Many Poles were shocked to hear that Brussels had begun the process to sanction their country, despite knowing in the back of their minds all along that this was a very probable scenario. The EU had been warning Poland for months now that it wouldn't tolerate the ruling Law & Justice party's (PiS) judicial reforms, labelling them as "anti-democratic" in spite of the same envisioned changes already being in place in many Western European countries. All that PiS wants to do is make it so that judges are accountable to the people, not to one another, and break the backs of the communist-era clique that still controls the country's courts. This is crucial in the modern context because PiS follows a EuroRealist ideology that aspires to improve Poland's sovereign standing in the EU, a vision which is directly at odds with EU-hegemon Germany's EuroLiberalism that instead wants all member states to be subservient to an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels.

EuroRealism vs. EuroLiberalism

The matter is an urgent one for Poland because PiS' Civic Platform (PO) predecessors stacked the courts with their allies before leaving power after the ruling party won the first-ever post-communist electoral majority in the country's history in 2015. PO's former leader is the current President of the European Council Donald Tusk, and he and his organization are popularly regarded as Germany's proxies in Poland. PiS, on the other hand, is allied with Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban's Fidesz party, with which it shares a strident belief in the conservative ideology of EuroRealism. It had long been the case that EuroLiberalism was on the ascent in Europe ever since the end of the Cold War, but the 2008 global economic recession and the 2015 Migrant Crisis sparked a grassroots movement all across Central and Eastern Europe which has seen the rapid rise of EuroRealism.