Agnieszka Bień-Kacała

Two years after the abortion decision of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal and just after the mid-term election in the USA, there was a calculation that the abortion issue might play a pivotal role in the parliamentary election in Poland in the Fall of 2023. Analysis of the USA election showed that the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision of the Supreme Court of June 2022 and discontent among voters on its result violating women’s rights significantly contributed to the electoral achievement of Democrats. On the eve of the electoral campaign in Poland, there was a hope that a similar trend might occur in the next election and might contribute to the loss of the majority of illiberal rulers. The paper focuses on using abortion arguments within the electoral campaign by competing political parties. The main question is, to what extent did the abortion issue influence the result of a general election in Poland in 2023 and the change of the ruling majority?

The centenary of the enactment of the March Constitution in Poland prompts questions about the constituent parts of the achievements of Polish constitutionalism of that period. The authors have found the issue of the sources of law worthy of attention, and among the latter, especially those acts that are situated between the classically conceived competences of the authorities, i.e., acts with the force of statute issued by the organs of executive authority. These acts, formally absent from the system of sources of law of the March Constitution until the enactment of the August amendment of 1926, appeared in the practice of the Second Republic at the time of the budgetary crisis in 1924, in the form of acts issued “by the President of the Republic on the basis of resolutions of the Council of Ministers”. These “special kinds of autonomous regulations” [Z. Cybichowski] provoked intensive discussions regarding both the admissibility of such delegation of legislative power, as well as the legal essence and constitutionality of aforementioned regulations. The authors would like to take a closer look at the institution of legal acts with the force of statutes as sources functioning in the era of democratic constitutional solutions establishing a parliamentary-cabinet system [i.e., in the years 1921–1926 and after 1989], without neglecting the historical and comparative context in which the examined institution evolved.