Constitutional populism and court-curbing in Poland and Hungary

In this article, I examine how the populist regimes of Hungary and Poland have attacked the entire judiciary, including the Constitutional Court, and how they have used the judiciary as a tool of the regime after the successful attack. In Section 2, I examine how the PiS and Fidesz regimes have attacked the Constitutional Court and the judiciary. To this end, I distinguish between formal and informal methods of attacking the Constitutional Court and the judiciary, and define formal ‘court-curbing’ as capturing the judiciary through the Constitution and law with ‘court-packing’. In addition, informal judiciary-curbing refers to methods of ignoring the Constitutional Court’s rulings, circumventing the Constitution through simple legislation, and undermining trust in the judiciary through blackmails and attacks on judges. In this article, I confirm that formal and informal curbing have similar results, although they differ in the speed at which they undermine the independence of the Constitutional Court and the judiciary. Section 3 examines the informal methods of court-curbing, including the court-packing of the Constitutional Court and the judiciary through the Polish PiS, and Section 4 focuses on the formal curbing of the Hungarian Fidesz, which degraded the entire judiciary, including the Constitutional Court, to a tool of the regime through several constitutional amendments and legislation. Section 5 compares the similarities and differences of the court-curbing of the PiS and Fidesz and looks forward to whether the rule of law and democracy in the two countries can return to democratic trajectory in the near future.