The two jailed ex-MPs from Poland’s former ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party will remain in jail for the time being while pardon procedures are underway, Prosecutor General Adam Bodnar said on January 12. 

Bodnar was reacting to a pledge by President Andrzej Duda to release Mariusz Kaminski and Maciej Wasik from jail – where they have been since Thursday after their arrest earlier this week –  while paperwork to pardon them upon the president’s request is carried out.

“I have received the president’s motion and I have familiarised myself with it. The procedure to pardon Kaminski and Wasik has begun and that is all I can say about this matter now,” Bodnar told a press conference. That means the ex-MPs are not going to be released for now.

The political tit-for-tat between the president – a stalwart ally of PiS –  and the government over the former MPs symbolises the growing political tension in Poland less than one month after the takeover of power by the new centrist coalition under Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

It also demonstrates the legal confusion left by PiS' attempts to exert more political control over the judicial system, which has led to the European Union freezing the disbursing of Poland's cohesion funds.

Kaminski and Mariusz Wasik were arrested in the Presidential Palace on January 9. They were convicted in December for abuse of power while leading the CBA, Poland’s anti-corruption bureau, in a  case dating back to 2007.

The arrest and its circumstances – the ex-MPs were apprehended in the Presidential Palace, where Duda had invited them – has caused uproar in the PiS camp. Polish law says that a convicted MP is automatically stopped of its mandate but PiS claims that the conviction of Kaminski and Wasik was political and the pair are still MPs, while their arrest and jailing were illegal.

President Andrzej Duda said he “would not rest” until Kaminski and Wasik are released and announced on January 11 that he would launch a pardon procedure to that end. Duda had already pardoned Kaminski and Wasik in 2015 in a decision that some legal experts said was invalid.

The opposition accuses Duda of playing a political game at the expense of the jailed MPs whom the president said were “crystal honest”. The pardon procedure in the version initiated by Duda involves the office of prosecutor general – held by new Justice Minister (and former ombudsman) Adam Bodnar – as well as courts, making it likely to last months. If Duda simply issued a presidential pardon, Kaminski and Wasik could have been released immediately, legal experts say.

Meanwhile, PiS has found the ex-MPs’ arrest a convenient development to rally their support around. An estimated tens of thousands of the party’s supporters gathered in front of the Polish parliament on the evening of January 11 in protest against the arrest and jailing of two former MPs earlier this week.

PiS’ chairman Jaroslaw Kaczyński used the rally to attack an alleged plan by the EU for a “practical liquidation of the Polish state” that PM Tusk is willing to implement.

The political fighting in Poland is expected to intensify by the end of January when the Tusk government will pass the budget for 2024. While President Duda cannot veto a budget bill, he can still send it to the PiS-controlled Constitutional Tribunal for review. That could in theory lead to the government’s missing the deadline for having a budget in place, which, in turn, gives the president grounds to cut the parliamentary term short and order a snap election.