On Friday, August 21, 2026, Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki posted a video on the X platform devoted to the fate of his legislative initiatives. He announced that, of the 22 bills he had referred to the Sejm — Poland’s lower house of parliament — the chamber had passed one, while the remaining 21:
[had] become stuck in the Sejm. No genuine work was undertaken on them and no better solutions were put forward in their place. Most of them were simply consigned to the Sejm’s legislative drawer.
The President renewed his appeal to the ruling coalition and to the Speaker of the Sejm to take these bills out of the so called legislative drawer and give them further course, in accordance with the Rules of Procedures of the Sejm.
“This is the so-called Speaker’s veto” — the Speaker of the Sejm admits that he is blocking the President’s bills
On Saturday, August 29, 2026, at the Campus Polska Przyszłości (Poland of the Future Campus – a summer camp-style political and civic festival linked with current ruling party in Poland) event in Olsztyn, one of the participants asked the Speaker how he differed from Elżbieta Witek, a figure associated with the practice of the Sejm’s legislative drawer. Włodzimierz Czarzasty’s answer deserves to be quoted in full:
President Nawrocki’s 23 bills, all of them are being processed, all of them in turn. But three have been blocked. By me. This is the so-called Speaker’s veto. And I will say this: if I had to repeat it, I would repeat it.
These are the three bills: the bill on the Polish Defense Investment Fund (the so-called Polish SAFE 0%), “Cheap Electricity −33%”, and the bill on restoring the right to a court and to the examination of one’s case without undue delay.
The point is that in Polish law the Speaker’s veto does not exist. No such institution is provided for by the Constitution, by any statute, or even by the Rules of Procedure of the Sejm. The Speaker of the Sejm himself, moreover, publicly admitted as much on November 22, 2025, the day after announcing this practice in his first address:
I know the Constitution, I know the Rules of Procedure of the Sejm. I know what the Speaker’s powers are. There is no such institution as a “Speaker’s veto.”
It must be honestly noted here that the Rules of Procedure of the Sejm bind the Speaker to no deadline — neither for ordering the printing of a submitted bill nor for referring it to a first reading. This does not mean, however, that these acts are left to his free discretion. Under Article 35(1) of the Rules of Procedure of the Sejm, the Speaker of the Sejm shall order the printing of bills and draft resolutions and their delivery to the Deputies, and under Article 35(2) he shall submit the bills introduced to the President, the Speaker of the Senate and the Prime Minister — these are therefore his duties.
If, on the other hand, the Speaker of the Sejm has any doubts as to a bill’s consistency with the law, the Rules of Procedure point him, in Article 34(8), to the following path: after seeking the opinion of the Presidium of the Sejm, he may refer the bill to the Legislative Committee, which by a three-fifths majority may rule it inadmissible — and only such an opinion opens up for the Speaker the possibility of not giving the bill further course. Yet nothing is known to suggest that, in the case of these three bills, the Speaker availed himself of this power.
It is worth remembering, moreover, what the actual effect of the Speaker’s action is — and that effect is genuinely to prevent the President from exercising one of his most important prerogatives. The President’s right of legislative initiative flows from Article 118(1) of the Polish Constitution, and its exercise — under Article 144(3)(4) of the Constitution — does not require the countersignature of the Prime Minister. It is therefore a power of the highest degree of independence that the Polish system grants to the head of state. If the Speaker of the Sejm can single-handedly and indefinitely block it at the preliminary stage, this prerogative loses any real meaning.
The political motives behind the Speaker’s censorial impulses
What is particularly troubling is the very justification of his motives that the Speaker himself provided:
That is why I did it — because I do not consent to populism, because I said that I will not debate with the orthodox right merely so that they can spit on me while I thank them and pat them on the head. There will be another such bill, there will be a fourth one frozen. All the rest are currently being processed. That is how I differ from Elżbieta Witek. […] And I would do it a second time. Why? One must keep as far away from the right as possible.
This is not a legal argument. It is a declaration that the course of the legislative process depends on the political identity of the sponsor — and that, toward one part of the political spectrum, the Speaker does not even intend to allow a debate to take place.
Excluding the right from debate has its own well-documented tradition in Poland
One cannot fail to notice that the mechanism whereby a State official decides which political currents deserve to take part in public life and which do not is well known in Polish history. It is worth recalling — especially in the context of the person of the Speaker, who from 1983 to 1990 was a member of the Polish United Workers’ Party (ie. the communist party).
Postwar Poland did not tolerate the right from the very first months of “people’s rule.” In July 1945, national activists set up the Legalization Committee of the National Party (the interwar nationalist, right-wing party that was Poland’s largest by membership before World War II), and on August 23, 1945, they submitted to the chancellery of communist dictator Bolesław Bierut a memorandum requesting that the party be allowed to operate legally; it was signed by, among others, Stanisław Rymar, Karol Stojanowski, Kazimierz Kobylański and Szymon Poradowski. The request was not granted, however, and in the autumn of 1945 the signatories were arrested. On November 4, 1945, a communiqué of the National Council of the Homeland closed the matter definitively, declaring that:
Proceeding from the premise of building a reborn Poland as a democratic State, the presidium of the National Council of the Homeland finds that the differentiation of democratic socio-political programs justified by the structure of our society is fully satisfied, in the present — still pre-electoral — phase of our State life, by the parties active today: the PPR, PPS, PSL, SL, SD and SP.
It is telling how long this list is. Tolerated — at least initially — were the agrarian Polish People’s Party, the Christian democratic Labor Party and the liberal-centrist Democratic Party, not to mention the Polish Socialist Party. No place was found, however, for one single formation: the national right.
We do not, of course, claim that the decisions of the Speaker of the Sejm are in any way comparable to the repressions of that time. Identical, however, is the assumption underlying them: that there exists an organ empowered to rule with which part of the political scene one holds discussions and with which one does not. That assumption was false in 1945 and it is false today.
The Speaker of the Sejm should be an impartial guardian of procedure, not a political censor
On September 2, 2026, the Speaker of the Sejm, following up on his statement at Campus Polska, convened a press conference at which he presented the status of the 23 presidential bills. He described three of them as follows:
Three are legal duds not referred for deliberation (…). If I wanted to bring a smile to your face, this is the so-called famous legislative drawer, or Speaker’s veto.
Formulations of this kind obviously do not reflect well on the level of political culture. What is essential here, however, is above all that both the Polish Constitution — in its Article 110(2):
The Speaker of the Sejm shall preside over the debates of the Sejm, safeguard the rights of the Sejm and represent the Sejm in external matters.
— and the Rules of Procedure of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland assign the Speaker a role entirely different from the one he has assigned himself.
This does not mean expecting the Speaker of the Sejm to be apolitical. In the commentary on Article 110 of the Constitution edited by Marek Safjan and Leszek Bosek, it is aptly observed:
Moreover, the provisions of the law do not establish any obligation of the Speaker to be apolitical — regardless of the office he holds, he remains a member of a parliamentary caucus, takes part in debate and votes, although it is obvious that, in performing his managing duties, he should remain impartial and objective.
This difference is crucial. The Speaker of the Sejm has every right to hold political views, to voice them as a MP, and even to vote against presidential bills. What he does not have is the right to carry those views over into the acts he performs as the person directing the chamber’s work — there, as legal scholarship indicates, he should remain impartial and objective.
Under Article 10(1), points 5 and 8, of the Rules of Procedure of the Sejm, the Speaker:
ensures the operation and punctuality of the work of the Sejm and its organs, and initiates the consideration of bills, draft resolutions and motions of State organs referred to the Sejm, after seeking the opinion of the Presidium of the Sejm.
“Ensuring punctuality” is a duty to speed up work, not to hold it back. “Initiating consideration” is a technical and organizational act, not a political one.
The Rules of Procedure provide for only two exceptions — both hedged with strict conditions. The first is Article 34(7): the Speaker may return a bill or draft resolution to the sponsor if the explanatory statement enclosed with it does not meet the requirements of the Rules of Procedure. This concerns, therefore, solely formal deficiencies in the explanatory statement. The second is the already-mentioned Article 34(8):
The Speaker of the Sejm, after seeking the opinion of the Presidium of the Sejm, may refer any bills or draft resolutions which raise doubts as to their consistency with law, including European Union law or basic principles of legislative technique, to the Legislative Committee for its opinion. The Committee may, by a three-fifths majority in the presence of at least half of its members, rule the bill inadmissible. The Speaker of the Sejm may decline to give further course to a bill ruled inadmissible.
This procedure is decidedly different from a discretionary Speaker’s veto. The assessment of whether a bill is a “legal dud” belongs to a collegial organ, requires a qualified majority — and thus, in practice, also the votes of part of the opposition — and is subject to an open procedure. None of the three presidential bills, however — according to publicly available information — was either returned under Article 34(7) or ruled inadmissible by the Legislative Committee.
The proper means for correcting errors and clarifying ambiguities is the full parliamentary procedure
At this point it must be clearly emphasized — something the Observer’s readers know from our earlier analyses: criticism of blocking a bill is not the same as an unconditional defense of it. The presidential bill on restoring the right to a court and to the examination of one’s case without undue delay raises certain reservations — and it was none other than the Ordo Iuris Institute that pointed them out.
In a legal opinion by Łukasz Bernaciński and Jędrzej Jabłoński, the accuracy of the bill’s diagnosis was acknowledged, but the following objections were raised: faulty systematics (the bill creates a new special statute, duplicating solutions already in force, instead of amending existing statutes), constitutional doubts as to Articles 7 and 10 of the bill in light of the principle of the irremovability of judges under Article 180 of the Constitution, and the incompleteness of the proposed solutions. In view of the above, the authors recommended preparing a sponsor’s amendment under Article 36(1a) of the Rules of Procedure of the Sejm.
Here we see precisely the crux of the problem — for the Rules of Procedure of the Sejm provide a whole arsenal of tools for repairing imperfect bills: besides the sponsor’s amendment already mentioned, there are, before the first reading, also Deputies’ amendments, committee work, public hearings, and finally the second and third readings. None of these tools, however, can operate until the bill receives a print number and is placed on the agenda. The Sejm’s legislative drawer, alias the Speaker’s veto, makes it impossible to use these tools and thereby to improve the bill it covers.
Had the Speaker of the Sejm, Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s ruling coalition and the Sejm majority therefore deemed the presidential bills harmful, they had at their disposal a lawful solution that would also be in accordance with the spirit of democracy: to refer them to a first reading and reject them in a vote. Such a path is fully legal, fully transparent and — most importantly — places political responsibility on Poland’s elected parliament, rather than on a single individual. That it is workable is proved by the fate of another presidential bill — the amendment to the Act on assistance to citizens of Ukraine, which the Sejm rejected at its first reading on November 7, 2025, by 244 votes to 198. A clear position of the parliamentary majority before the voters enables them to assess this decision and draw conclusions from it. The Speaker of the Sejm’s usurpation of the role of censor blurs that responsibility, which is hard to regard as consistent with the spirit of democracy on part of Donald Tusk’s EU-backed governing coalition.
The Speaker’s practice confirms the need to amend the Rules of Procedure of the Sejm
It must, however, be honestly acknowledged here that the problem of the Speaker’s veto is not confined to the person of Włodzimierz Czarzasty. The practice of the legislative drawer has accompanied Polish parliamentarism for years and burdens the previous term as well. Law and Justice (PiS) Speaker Elżbieta Witek did not give further course to three bills of the Ombudsman, Marcin Wiącek — concerning, among other things, compensation for persons wrongfully accused and access to compensation for victims of crime — justifying this by their budgetary consequences, even though the Rules of Procedure granted her no such power of assessment; the Ombudsman pointed out at the time that refusing to assign a print number without a negative opinion of the Legislative Committee is unlawful. At the end of the previous term, somewhat more than 300 bills submitted either by the Senate or by the opposition — both from the left and from the right — were lying in the Sejm without a print number.
The conclusion is a single one: as long as the Rules of Procedure of the Polish Sejm do not set a deadline for giving a bill further course, every Speaker will be tempted to use the drawer as a political tool. The solution is not appeals for good will, but a change in the rules. Among the proposals already submitted, the most interesting is the one from the draft amendment to the Rules of Procedure of the Sejm of December 9, 2021, which envisaged adding to Article 37 of the Rules of Procedure a paragraph reading:
The first reading shall take place no later than within six months of the day on which the bill (draft resolution) is submitted into the hands of the Speaker of the Sejm.
That same draft proposed a symmetrical safeguard from the other side: raising to two-thirds the majority required to shorten the seven-day time limits before the first and second readings and to shorten the legislative procedure, so that the express mode would apply solely to uncontested bills enjoying cross-party acceptance. Given that this draft was prepared by one of the parties of the current ruling coalition — the centrist agrarian PSL party — it is surprising that it was not adopted, or at least resubmitted in the current term; unfortunately, once again the sad, iron law of Polish democracy makes itself felt, according to which a party proposes one thing when in opposition and does another when it comes to power…
Summary
To sum up, it must be stated once again, first, that the so-called Speaker’s veto has no legal basis whatsoever, as its own author has publicly admitted. The Rules of Procedure of the Sejm provide only one way to challenge a bill, and it leads not through the Speaker’s office but through the Legislative Committee and a three-fifths majority. Second, by blocking the presidential bills, the Speaker of the Sejm in practice nullifies the prerogative established by Article 118(1), in conjunction with Article 144(3)(4), of the Constitution. Third, making the progress of legislative work publicly conditional on whether the sponsor belongs to the “orthodox right” strikes at the impartiality of public authorities (Article 25(2)), the prohibition of discrimination in political life (Article 32(2)), and the principle of political pluralism (Article 11(1) of the Constitution).
Admittedly, under the current state of the law, it is difficult to identify any legal remedy that could be applied to the Speaker’s actions other than an amendment to the Rules of Procedure of the Sejm. It might perhaps be appropriate for the Constitutional Tribunal to rule on the matter, although it must be recalled that the current ruling coalition in Poland has refrained from publishing and implementing the rulings of the country’s constitutional court since April 2024. Thus, referring the matter to the Constitutional Tribunal is unlikely to compel Speaker Czarzasty—a former communist who is now the leader of the New Left party and an ally of Donald Tusk—to abide by the most basic principles of democracy and the rule of law.
Source of illustration: iStock.