Poland: the war of the judges, or who holds the state machine

According to Le Monde, the police intervened in the premises of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal, and the suspension of its highly contested president has been announced. On Saturday, head of state Karol Nawrocki gathered representatives of the centrist majority parties and the nationalist opposition to try to get out of the crisis. No tangible results, the paper notes. Brussels, for its part, is calling on the president to validate the appointment of new judges.

What we do not yet know: the detail of each camp's grievances, the content of Saturday's discussions, what the president will do next. The dispatch is thin. What remains is the question of substance, and it is simple: whom does this tribunal serve?

Our reading. We are presented with a duel between "the rule of law" and "populism". Convenient. But a constitutional court is not an arbiter dropped from the sky. It is a cog in the state, and the state, Lenin reminded us, is an instrument in the service of a class. The judges, the police, the civil servants: this "public power" placed above society, as Engels wrote, quoted in The State and Revolution, has its own interests and its own masters. Both Polish camps know this very well. They are not fighting for legality. They are fighting over who manufactures it.

On one side, a centrist-liberal camp attached to Poland's integration into the European economic order, that of open markets and structural funds. On the other, a nationalist presidency that relies on a social base and fractions of local capital that prefer their own rents to Brussels' tutelage. Two bourgeois projects. Two ways of managing the same system. The tribunal is the bolt: whoever holds it can block the other side's laws.

And Brussels? It "calls" on the president to sign. The tone is that of juridical solicitude. Cui bono? A Poland whose institutions are aligned guarantees a predictable framework for investors, contracts and capital flows between West and East. The Union is also a bloc that defends its sphere of influence: legal discipline is the polite form of economic discipline. It is worth noting that the same Union is less moved when the judges are compliant.

Police in a tribunal is the moment when the fiction tears. The "neutral" law shows what it is: a codified balance of forces. When two dominant fractions no longer agree, each pulls out the other's truncheon.

And Polish workers in all this? Absent from Saturday's table. Whether one camp prevails or a backroom compromise is cobbled together, the lesson of Rosa Luxemburg holds: an institutional deal is judged by how much strength and confidence it gives those below. Here, nothing. They are invited to choose their manager.