Polish president approves postponement of local elections despite opposition criticism

Local elections previously due to take place next year have been postponed until 2024 after President Andrzej Duda signed into law a bill to that effect proposed by the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party.

The decision has been criticised by constitutional lawyers and the opposition, whose majority in the upper-house Senate rejected the bill but saw that overturned by the government’s majority in the more powerful lower-house Sejm.

PiS argues that the move will help avoid a clash with parliamentary elections that are also due next autumn. However, the opposition accuses PiS, which has been falling in the polls, of wanting to delay the local elections for its own political benefit.

“Although it is permissible sometimes to deviate from a constitutional principle, this is only possible if this is necessary to achieve another constitutional value,” said senator Krzysztof Kwiatkowski, providing the justification for the Senate’s decision to reject the bill, quoted by Wirtualna Polska.

“The extension of the term of office is not aimed at any constitutional value, and the convenience of the organisers is not a constitutional value,” he added, noting that senators decided to reject the law after discussions with legal and constitutional experts as well as local government officials.

“Constitutionalists pointed out that the law violates the constitutional principles of a democratic state, legal security and the citizen’s trust in the state and the laws it makes,” said Kwiatkowski.

In an opinion submitted to the Senate, Ryszard Piotrowski, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Warsaw, said that the bill puts “politics above the law” and could “hinder the functioning of local government as a community of residents”, reports the Rzeczpospolita daily.

Mariusz Jabłoński, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Wrocław, also argued that the bill elevates the “less valuable good of organisational convenience” above the “higher good of voting rights and making electoral decisions in the confidence of a strictly defined term of office”.

The Senate’s decision to reject the bill was, however, subsequently overturned by the Sejm. It was then sent for the approval of President Duda, a government ally, who signed it into law yesterday.

Duda deemed extending the current term of local officials to 30 April 2024 – a move necessary to delay elections – to be “acceptable in the context of other election processes and campaigns”, tweeted the president’s chief of staff, Paweł Szrot.

However, while PiS has argued that moving the local elections is necessary to avoid a clash with parliamentary elections next autumn, the opposition notes that the new date of local elections will be similarly close to European elections due in spring 2024.

It believes that the real reason for the change is PiS’s fear that a poor result in the local elections will pave the way for a defeat in the subsequent parliamentary elections, reports RMF24.

Main photo credit: Krzysztof Sitkowski/KPRP

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.