Criticism Towards the Ruler: Illustrations From the Letter of the Law and the Practice of the Polish Constitutional State

The publication is devoted to several examples of the practice of criticism of the Head of State and executive power in Polish history. The authors have chosen three moments of interest: the first one is the first decade of the “Congress” Polish Kingdom established in 1815, and the second refers to the Second Polish Republic in the period after the coup d’État by Józef Piłsudski in 1926. Finally, the authors refer to some practical aspects of criticism of the authority in the public space in recent times, also recalling the high-profile criminal trial that reached the highest instance – the Supreme Court in 2023. In these examples, the authors focus on aspects of the permissibility of criticism, its specific forms and the reaction of the executive in the early history of the constitutional state and camouflaged criticism of power respectively, through the interwar liberal model of protection of freedom of speech and of the press, which failed in the face of authoritarian changes and the political will to protect the good name of one particular individual; after the death of Piłsudski, the lack of adequate legal protection post mortem was finally “remedied” by a particular repressive law. The last section of the discussion refers to the contemporary Polish state of law, and here the focus is on the faces of criticism and the forms of its suppression. In particular, attention was paid to the problem of the extensive use of means used by the police against criticism particularly unpleasant to the power camp (up to the bizarre action with the hiring of a jib) and the question of maintaining specific protection of the Head of State against defamation in the Criminal Code.