Supreme Court upholds electoral commission’s rejection of opposition party’s financial report

Poland’s Supreme Court has upheld a decision by the electoral commission to reject the annual financial report of Poland 2050 (Polska 2050), one of the country’s main opposition groups. The decision comes ahead of parliamentary elections this autumn.

In December, the National Electoral Commission (PKW) rejected Poland 2050’s report for 2021, which did not record any expenditure or revenue.

Poland 2050 – a centrist movement founded by former TV present Szymon Hołownia after he finished third in the 2020 presidential elections – explained that the blank report was the result of it only being officially registered as a political party in the first half of 2022.

According to the party’s treasurer, as cited in the Supreme Court’s justification for its ruling, the party was unable to record any transactions as a bank declined to establish an account for the party ahead of the completion of the registration process, which it had launched in March 2021.

Hołownia himself said in December 2022 that, during the period in question, all of his movement’s activities were formally organised by a seperate association and institute that were legally registered. “The party did not organise anything,” he said, quoted by RMF24.

In the PKW’s view, however, initiation of the registration process should have been enough for a party to establish a bank account. It warned that accepting Poland 2050’s arguments “would mean that, in essence, the party could raise funds from all sorts of entities without restriction”.

“In the commission’s view, in a situation in which the bank approached by Szymon Hołownia’s Poland 2050 political party…did not agree to sign a contract for the opening and operation of the account…[the party] should avail itself the services of other banks operating on the market,” noted the Supreme Court.

In December, however, Hołownia claimed that “all banks refused to open an account for us, explaining that we were not legally registered or that they did not keep accounts for political parties”. But, in a ruling issued this week, the Supreme Court noted that his party had not provided evidence to substantiate this claim.

The judges were ruling on the case because Poland 2050 decided to challenge the PKW’s decision. In their ruling, they noted that the provisions of the law on political parties are unambiguous and categorical in nature, leaving the commission “obliged to reject the [financial] report”.

The court also pointed out that, despite the party’s bank account not being opened until 2022, its representative carried out their activities using, inter alia, funding from various foundations and associations.

“The transparency of political financing directly translates into the implementation of the standards of a democratic state of law, in particular the freedom and transparency of political activities, as well as the use by political parties of only democratic methods of influencing the shaping of state policy or the exercise of public authority,” wrote the court.

The judges also noted that Hołownia’s foundation and institute, which operated before the registration of his party, “promoted the same ideas, views and programmes” as the party, “using the same promotional materials”, and even an “identical logo” to the party.

“Even the decision of the party’s board to refrain from certain forms of activity does not cause the political party to lose its legal personality or undergo a kind of ‘legal suspension’,” argued the court. Consequently the party remained obliged to comply with “the implementation of the constitutional principle of transparency in financing political parties”.

Under Poland’s law on political parties, if a party’s financial report is rejected by the PKW, and that decision is upheld by the Supreme Court, “the political party loses the right to receive the [state] subsidy in the next three years in which it is entitled to receive it”.

In Poland, most political parties receive state subsidies, which often constitute a significant part of their funding. However, news weekly Wprost notes that Poland 2050 currently does not receive such subsidies, so the PKW and Supreme Court’s decision has a largely “symbolic meaning”.

In 2021, Hołownia was ordered to return 201,000 zloty in funds raised during his presidential campaign after the PKW found irregularities. In that case, the Supreme Court also rejected a challenge to the decision.

Changes to the electoral commission and the Supreme Court introduced during the rule of the current government have led some experts and opposition figures to question their independence and legitimacy.

Alicja Ptak

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