https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8023-7360
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ABSTRACT
If populists capture the constitutional court, the system of separation of powers will change. The constitutional court does not act as a counterweight to the ruling majority but rather as a tool for the ruling majority itself to advance its interests. This article unpacks this aspect of populist constitutionalism, which I referred to as the instrumental abuse of constitutional courts. Most importantly, it presents and analyses five different techniques by which populists can abuse the constitutional court as an instrument against opposition. These techniques are the ‘governing, do not disturb’ technique, consisting in not quashing unconstitutional acts; the legitimation technique, through which populists justify their actions; the delegation technique, through which populists shift responsibility for potentially unpopular actions to the constitutional court; the outright counter-opposition technique, through which populists can achieve the liquidation of their opponents; and the extra-legal technique, involving the use of the authority of judges in the media.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Aleksandra Gliszczyńska-Grabias and Wojciech Sadurski, ‘The Judgment That Wasn’t (But Which Nearly Brought Poland to a Standstill): “Judgment” of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal of 22 October 2020, K1/20’, European Constitutional Law Review 17, no. 1 (March 2021): 131, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1574019621000067.
2 By opposition I mean, in a broad sense, critics of populist government - from political opponents to civil society and the media to academics.
3 Mirosław Wyrzykowski and Michał Ziółkowski, ‘Illiberal Constitutionalism and the Judiciary’, in Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism (New York: Routledge, 2021); Pablo Castillo-Ortiz, ‘The Illiberal Abuse of Constitutional Courts in Europe’, European Constitutional Law Review 15, no. 1 (March 2019): 48–72, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1574019619000026; Rosalind Dixon and David Landau, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy, 1st edition (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2021); Zdeněk Kühn, ‘The Judiciary in Illiberal States’, German Law Journal 22, no. 7 (October 2021): 1231–46, https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2021.71; Hubert Smekal, Jaroslav Benák, and Ladislav Vyhnánek, ‘Through Selective Activism towards Greater Resilience: The Czech Constitutional Court’s Interventions into High Politics in the Age of Populism’, The International Journal of Human Rights 0, no. 0 (26 November 2021): 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2021.2003337; András Sajó, Ruling by Cheating (Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
4 Wojciech Sadurski, Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown, Oxford Comparative Constitutionalism (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
5 Castillo-Ortiz, ‘The Illiberal Abuse of Constitutional Courts in Europe’; Dixon and Landau, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing.
6 See e. g. Carlos de la Torre, ed., Routledge Handbook of Global Populism, 1st edition (London, New York: Routledge, 2018).
7 E.g. David Landau, ‘Personalism and the Trajectories of Populist Constitutions’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science 16 (2020): 293–309, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-041420-113519; Sadurski, Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown, 20; Agnes Akkerman, Cas Mudde, and Andrej Zaslove, ‘How Populist Are the People? Measuring Populist Attitudes in Voters’, Comparative Political Studies 47, no. 9 (1 August 2014): 1326, https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414013512600; Kurt Weyland, ‘Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics’, Comparative Politics 34, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.
8 See e.g. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, ‘The Global Dimensions of Populist Nationalism’, The International Spectator 54, no. 2 (3 April 2019): 18, https://doi.org/10.1080/03932729.2019.1592870; Vlastimil Havlík, ‘Technocratic Populism and Political Illiberalism in Central Europe’, Problems of Post-Communism 66, no. 6 (2 November 2019): 370, https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2019.1580590; David Fontana, ‘Unbundling Populism’, UCLA Law Review 65 (2018): 1487.
9 Cas Mudde, ‘The Populist Zeitgeist’, Government and Opposition 39, no. 4 (2004): 243, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x.
10 Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 20.
11 See Petra Dobner and Martin Loughlin, eds., The Twilight of Constitutionalism? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 55; N. W. Barber, The Principles of Constitutionalism (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2018), 19.
12 Gábor Halmai, ‘Populism, Authoritarianism and Constitutionalism’, German Law Journal 20, no. 3 (April 2019): 311, https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2019.23; Ronald Dworkin, ‘Constitutionalism and Democracy’, European Journal of Philosophy 3, no. 1 (1995): 2, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0378.1995.tb00035.x; Keith E. Whittington, R. Daniel Kelemen, and Gregory A. Caldeira, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics, 1st edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 281.
13 Mark Tushnet, ‘Authoritarian Constitutionalism. Some Conceptual Issues.’, in Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes, ed. Tom Ginsburg and Alberto Simpser (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 36–49.
14 Gábor Halmai, ‘Is There Such Thing as ‘Populist Constitutionalism’? The Case of Hungary’, Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 11, no. 3 (1 September 2018): 329, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-018-0211-5.
15 See Tushnet, ‘Authoritarian Constitutionalism. Some Conceptual Issues’, 36–49; Paul Blokker, ‘Varieties of Populist Constitutionalism: The Transnational Dimension’, German Law Journal 20, no. 3 (April 2019): 334, https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2019.19.
16 See Bojan Bugarič, ‘The Two Faces of Populism: Between Authoritarian and Democratic Populism’, German Law Journal 20, no. 3 (April 2019): 190, https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2019.20; Paul Blokker, ‘Populist Constitutionalism’, in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism, ed. Carlos de la Torre, 1st edition (London, New York: Routledge, 2018), 125.
17 See for more detail Richard Bellamy, Political Constitutionalism: A Republican Defence of the Constitutionality of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511490187; Jeremy Waldron, ‘Constitutionalism: A Skeptical View’, NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 10-87, 1 May 2012; Paul Blokker, New Democracies in Crisis?, 1st edition (Routledge, 2015), 23–30.
18 See Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser et al., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Populism, 1st edition (Oxford, United Kingdom ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Torre, Routledge Handbook of Global Populism.
19 See Blokker, ‘Varieties of Populist Constitutionalism’.
20 Cf. Jan-Werner Müller, ‘Populism and Constitutionalism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Populism, ed. Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser et al., 1st edition (Oxford, United Kingdom ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
21 Dixon and Landau, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing.
22 Dixon and Landau, 36–7.
23 Sadurski, Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown, 253.
24 Tímea Drinóczi and Agnieszka Bień-Kacała, ‘Illiberal Constitutionalism: The Case of Hungary and Poland’, German Law Journal 20, no. 8 (December 2019): 1140–66, https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2019.83.
25 See Maciej Bernatt and Michał Ziółkowski, ‘Statutory Anti-Constitutionalism’, Washington International Law Journal 28, no. 2 (1 April 2019): 487.
26 Dixon and Landau, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing, 184.
27 Wyrzykowski and Ziółkowski, ‘Illiberal Constitutionalism and the Judiciary’, 526.
28 Sadurski, Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown, 255.
29 Wojciech Sadurski, Rights Before Courts: A Study of Constitutional Courts in Postcommunist States of Central and Eastern Europe, 2nd ed. (Springer Netherlands, 2014), 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8935-6.
30 Wyrzykowski and Ziółkowski, ‘Illiberal Constitutionalism and the Judiciary’, 518.
31 Cf. Kühn, ‘The Judiciary in Illiberal States’, 1243.
32 Castillo-Ortiz, ‘The Illiberal Abuse of Constitutional Courts in Europe’, 68; see also Müller, ‘Populism and Constitutionalism’.
33 David Kosař, ‘The Least Accountable Branch’, International Journal of Constitutional Law 11, no. 1 (1 January 2013): 260, https://doi.org/10.1093/icon/mos056.
34 Kosař, 260.
35 David Kosař and Katarína Šipulová, ‘How to Fight Court-Packing’, Constitutional Studies 6, no. 1 (2020): 135.
36 For further details see Kosař and Šipulová, ‘How to Fight Court-Packing’.
37 Wyrzykowski and Ziółkowski, ‘Illiberal Constitutionalism and the Judiciary’, 528.
38 Dixon and Landau, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing, 92.
39 Cf. András Sajó and Renáta Uitz, The Constitution of Freedom: An Introduction to Legal Constitutionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 128, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198732174.001.0001.
40 Barber, The Principles of Constitutionalism, 79–82.
41 David Kosař, Jiří Baroš, and Pavel Dufek, ‘The Twin Challenges to Separation of Powers in Central Europe: Technocratic Governance and Populism’, European Constitutional Law Review 15, no. 3 (September 2019): 434, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1574019619000336.
42 Castillo-Ortiz, ‘The Illiberal Abuse of Constitutional Courts in Europe’, 67.
43 Wyrzykowski and Ziółkowski, ‘Illiberal Constitutionalism and the Judiciary’, 519.
44 Smekal, Benák, and Vyhnánek, ‘Through Selective Activism towards Greater Resilience’, 3.
45 Jan Cienski, ‘The Duda in Poland’, POLITICO, 24 May 2015, https://www.politico.eu/article/upset-in-poland-2/.
46 Sadurski, Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown, 106–7.
47 Sadurski, 124.
48 See Laurent Pech, Patryk Wachowiec, and Dariusz Mazur, ‘Poland’s Rule of Law Breakdown: A Five-Year Assessment of EU’s (In)Action’, Hague Journal on the Rule of Law 13, no. 1 (April 2021): 1–43, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40803-021-00151-9.
49 Sadurski, Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown, 258.
50 Sadurski, 258.
51 Sadurski, 62–5.
52 Sadurski, 62–5.
53 Kosař and Šipulová, ‘How to Fight Court-Packing’, 142.
54 Sadurski, Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown, 69.
55 Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen, Populism and Civil Society: The Challenge to Constitutional Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 72.
56 Sadurski, Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown, 81.
57 Wyrzykowski and Ziółkowski, ‘Illiberal Constitutionalism and the Judiciary’, 519.
58 Kühn, ‘The Judiciary in Illiberal States’, 1244.
59 Inspiration for the name of this technique comes from the Czech documentary film 'Governing, Don’t Disturb!‘ (2007) directed by Tomáš Kudrna.
60 The judgment of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal of 9 December 2015, K 35/15, and the judgment of 9 March 2016, K 47/15.
61 Sadurski, Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown, 71.
62 Sadurski, 73–4.
63 See Smekal, Benák, and Vyhnánek, ‘Through Selective Activism towards Greater Resilience’, 3.
64 Martin M. Shapiro, Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis, Paperback ed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 27.
65 Dixon and Landau, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing, 82.
66 Castillo-Ortiz, ‘The Illiberal Abuse of Constitutional Courts in Europe’, 68.
67 Tamir Moustafa, ‘Law and Courts in Authoritarian Regimes’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science 10, no. 1 (3 November 2014): 286, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-110413-030532.
68 See e. g. statements of the Chief Justice of the Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, Julia Przyłębska. Sadurski, Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown, 82.
69 Sadurski, 151.
70 Sadurski, 152–3.
71 Dixon and Landau, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing, 85.
72 Dixon and Landau, 85.
73 Dixon and Landau, 92.
74 Wyrzykowski and Ziółkowski, ‘Illiberal Constitutionalism and the Judiciary’, 517.
75 Cf. Castillo-Ortiz, ‘The Illiberal Abuse of Constitutional Courts in Europe’, 69.
76 Gliszczyńska-Grabias and Sadurski, ‘The Judgment That Wasn’t (But Which Nearly Brought Poland to a Standstill)’, 131.
77 Jan Cienski, ‘Protests Shake Poland as Government Looks for a Retreat on Abortion Ruling’, POLITICO, 30 October 2020, https://www.politico.eu/article/poland-abortion-protests-shake-government-retreat/.
78 Magdalena Miecznicka, ‘Polish Protesters Are Aghast at Abortion Ban’s Moral Hypocrisy’, 3 November 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/1fc1b1b1-8b58-4bba-8f98-69317f9b98df.
79 Gliszczyńska-Grabias and Sadurski, ‘The Judgment That Wasn’t (But Which Nearly Brought Poland to a Standstill)’, 135.
80 Gliszczyńska-Grabias and Sadurski, 138.
81 The judgment of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal of 7 October 2021, K 3/21.
82 See Stanislav Biernat and Ewa Letowska, ‘This Was Not Just Another Ultra Vires Judgment!’, Verfassungsblog (blog), 2021, https://verfassungsblog.de/this-was-not-just-another-ultra-vires-judgment/.
83 Jakub Jaraczewski, ‘Gazing into the Abyss’, Verfassungsblog (blog), 2021, https://verfassungsblog.de/gazing-into-the-abyss/.
84 Pech, Wachowiec, and Mazur, ‘Poland’s Rule of Law Breakdown’, 2.
85 See András Bozóki and Dániel Hegedűs, ‘An Externally Constrained Hybrid Regime: Hungary in the European Union’, Democratization 25, no. 7 (3 October 2018): 1182, https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2018.1455664.
86 Kublik, ‘Kto się boi polexitu. Sondaż Ipsos dla OKO.press i ‘Wyborczej’’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 1 October 2021, https://wyborcza.pl/7,75398,27647569,ipsos-dla-oko-press-i-wyborczej.html.
87 Maia de la Baume and David M. Herszenhorn, ‘Ursula von Der Leyen, Mateusz Morawiecki Clash in European Parliament’, POLITICO, 19 October 2021, https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-mateusz-morawiecki-clash-rule-of-law-european-parliament/.
88 PAP, ‘Justice Minister Praises Polish Constitution Supremacy Ruling’, The First News, 8 October 2021, https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/justice-minister-praises-polish-constitution-supremacy-ruling-25261.
89 Jaraczewski, ‘Gazing into the Abyss’; Biernat and Letowska, ‘This Was Not Just Another Ultra Vires Judgment!’; Paul Craig, ‘Op-Ed: ‘The Rule of Law, Breach and Consequence’’, EU Law Live, 21 October 2021, https://eulawlive.com/op-ed-the-rule-of-law-breach-and-consequence-by-paul-craig/; Adam Łazowski and Michal Ziółkowski, ‘Knocking on Polexit’s Door?’, CEPS (blog), 21 October 2021, https://www.ceps.eu/knocking-on-polexits-door/; Herwig C. H. Hofmann, ‘Sealed, Stamped and Delivered’, Verfassungsblog (blog), 2021, https://verfassungsblog.de/sealed-stamped-and-delivered/; Rule of Law, ‘25 Retired Judges of the Constitutional Tribunal Appeal to PM Morawiecki to Withdraw His Motion in K 3/21 Case’, Rule of Law, 2021, https://ruleoflaw.pl/25-retired-judges-morawiecki-k-3-21/.
90 See e. g. Zdeněk Kühn, The Judiciary in Central and Eastern Europe: Mechanical Jurisprudence in Transformation?, Law in Eastern Europe, v. 61 (Leiden; Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2011), 36–62.
91 Dixon and Landau, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing, 94.
92 Venice Commission, ‘Guidelines on Prohibition and Dissolution of Political Parties and Analogous Measures’ (Venice: European Commission for Democracy through Law, 10 January 2000), 20.
93 See Judith Townend, ‘Freedom of Expression and the Chilling Effect’, in The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights (Routledge, 2017).
94 See David Landau, ‘The Myth of the Illiberal Democratic Constitution’, in Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism (New York: Routledge, 2021), 434.
95 See e. g. statements of the Chief Justice of the Czech Constitutional Court about the personal history of the Czech Prime Minister ČTK, ‘Rychetský: Nečekal jsem, že můžeme mít premiérem takovou osobu. Uzavření hranic bylo protiústavní’, iROZHLAS, 2020, https://www.irozhlas.cz/zpravy-domov/pavel-rychetsky-babis-nouzovy-stav-koronavirus_2011301008_pj.
96 Landau, ‘The Myth of the Illiberal Democratic Constitution’, 434.
97 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 3rd edition (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1950), 269.
98 See Dixon and Landau, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing; Sadurski, Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown, 262.
99 Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018), 177.
100 Mátyás Bencze, ‘Judicial Populism and the Weberian Judge—The Strength of Judicial Resistance Against Governmental Influence in Hungary’, German Law Journal 22, no. 7 (October 2021): 1294, https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2021.67.
101 Kühn, ‘The Judiciary in Illiberal States’, 1241.
102 Castillo-Ortiz, ‘The Illiberal Abuse of Constitutional Courts in Europe’, 70.
103 Arato and Cohen, Populism and Civil Society, 180.
104 Smekal, Benák, and Vyhnánek, ‘Through Selective Activism towards Greater Resilience’.
105 See for more detail Bellamy, Political Constitutionalism; Waldron, ‘Constitutionalism’; Blokker, New Democracies in Crisis?, 23–30.
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Michal Kovalčík
Michal Kovalčík is a master's student at Faculty of Law, Masaryk University, Brno where he has already earned a bachelor's degree in political science. He works as a student research assistant at the Department of the Constitutional Law and Political Science and Judicial Studies Institute, Masaryk University. He also trained for a longterm internship at the Czech Constitutional Court in the chamber of Judge Kateřina Šimáčková, and from the autumn, he will intern at the Supreme Administrative Court in the chamber of Judge Michal Bobek. In his initial works, he has focused on the role of courts at the domestic as well as European level. This topic also determined the subject of his to-be diploma thesis, which will addresss the judicial dialogue between the Czech Constitutional Court and ordinary courts via the concrete constitutional review mechanism.