Polish President Andrzej Duda signed the 2024 budget bill into law on January 31 but sent it immediately to the country’s constitutional court for review.

The budget is now law but the president’s insistence that the bill’s adoption by the parliament may have been unconstitutional has further strained his relations with the Donald Tusk government, which only took office in mid-December.

Duda is the last important redoubt of the formerly ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party. The president  – who is stepping down next year after his second and final term runs out – pledged early on that he would use his powers to obstruct the new government each time he would consider it necessary.

This time, Duda referred the budget bill to the Constitutional Tribunal – a formally independent body, which PiS had engineered to become the party’s political tool – over concerns that it was adopted without two PiS MPs, Mariusz Kaminski and Maciej Wasik.

The two were in prison at the time following their conviction in an abuse of power case dating back to 2007. Duda pardoned Kaminski and Wasik earlier this month and insists they are incumbent MPs. The government says that their mandates were invalidated following their conviction.

Duda also hinted that he would take the same route whenever elected representatives faced obstacles in fulfilling their mandates derived from general elections, the president’s office said.

Prime Minister Tusk dismissed Duda’s take on how the budget bill was adopted, saying on X that “the budget is signed, and that's the whole point. The rest is irrelevant. Money will reach the people and nothing will stop it.”

While Duda’s straightforward refusal to sign off the budget bill would have led to a snap election, it is unclear what will happen if the Constitutional Tribunal renders the budget bill, or parts of it, unconstitutional after the president signed it.

The budget bill assumes a deficit of PLN 184bn (€42.48bn), coming in part because of the government’s delivering on its promises to hike salaries in the education sector as well as maintain some welfare expenditure introduced by PiS.