Corruption by Design: Poland’s Rule of Law Backslide Under Law and Justice

When the EU activated the Rule of Law Conditionality mechanism against Hungary in 2022, it refrained from applying the same mechanism to Poland. While some experts argued that Poland’s corruption levels were less systemic than Hungary’s, suggesting the Commission lacked evidence to demonstrate that judicial infringements directly threatened EU financial interests, others contested this view. Contributing to the growing body of research on corruption and populism, this article examines this puzzle by exploring the extent to which corruption was a salient characteristic of the Kaczyński regime from 2015 to 2023. Notably, corruption has been a defining feature of the Law and Justice party even before this period. Having won the parliamentary elections in 2005 largely on an anti-corruption platform, the populist coalition it constructed nonetheless collapsed due to corruption scandals two years later. Using a triangulation strategy—analyzing official EU Rule of Law reports, news sources, and leading expert interviews, contrasted with empirical findings from the BridgeGAP Horizon project -under the lead of Prof. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, in which I co-lead the IBEI team—this article demonstrates that by lowering rule of law standards, Law and Justice intentionally facilitated a corruption-enabling system in Poland. Specifically, the Kaczyński party captured the judiciary, subordinated the prosecutor’s office, and politicized the civil service. Additionally, it leveraged state-owned enterprises (SOEs), using their extensive resources to consolidate the ruling party’s political power. This corruption-enabling system has impacted substantial portions of the EU’s cohesion funding, thereby justifying the potential application of the Rule of Law Conditionality mechanism against Poland. By establishing the intrinsic link between rule of law and corruption within the EU’s multi-level governance system, this article contributes not only to the literature on democratic and rule of law backsliding in the EU but also to EU integration studies.