Sovereignty or Submission? Poland’s Battle Against the Eurocrats

The governing question pertaining to the attempted coup d’état in Poland Friday night was neatly expressed in the title of John Fonte’s brilliant 2011 book: Sovereignty or Submission? Fonte was writing about America. Would Americans, he wanted to know, be ruled by themselves? Or would they be ruled by others? In other words, who governs? The people or the unelected bureaucrats? It is one of the central political questions of our times, as applicable to Europe, Australia, Canada, and South America as it is to the United States.

Increasingly, it seems, the answer is “the bureaucrats.” Just a week ago, Brazil went through an extremely dodgy election in which a last-minute, illegal extension of voting yielded the Communist Lula da Silva a victory over Flávio Bolsonaro. The EU was pleased by, and perhaps contributed to, the outcome. Or consider what happened in Hungary. In May, Péter Magyar defeated Viktor Orbán. Magyar moved quickly to ban his opponents from ever running again and even started legal proceedings against some. In Germany, the AfD is wildly popular with the people, but not with the ruling party or the commissars in the EU. Hence, it is subject to unending harassment and may be banned altogether. In France, Marine Le Pen was put under house arrest and required to wear an electronic ankle monitor. In Romania, when the “wrong” candidate ran, the election was cancelled, and the winner was banned from running. This is what Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU, means by “democracy”: submission to the diktats of the European Union.

In Poland, the usual mold may be being broken. As I write, we are still in a fog-of-war situation. Many things have been tossed up into the air. It is not entirely clear where they all will land.

A little background. Poland is a parliamentary republic with a prime minister and a president. The former is head of the government and handles the day-to-day executive functions. The latter is head of state and handles foreign policy and higher-level executive functions and is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He also has the power to veto legislation and appoint judges. The prime minister since 2023 has been Donald Tusk, an EU poodle and liberal authoritarian. The president since 2025 is Karol Nawrocki, an anti-EU, Poland-first populist who wants Poland to keep its own currency, have control of its borders, and sharply limit immigration.