It was supposed to be the plan that would give the Polish radical rightwing government extra momentum to carry them from the pandemic to next year's general election. Instead, National Reconstruction Plan has turned into an empty promise that may cost it the election.

All because the ruling coalition’s razor-thin majority hangs on a group of Eurosceptics that just won’t let go.

Poland’s prospects for receiving in good time the €36bn from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Fund, the bloc’s tool to speed up economic revival after the COVID-19 (coronavirus) recession of 2020, are fading.

While the money is going to flow eventually – or so it is expected – the Polish government’s tussle with Brussels over its judicial reforms have held it back for eight months now, and counting.

That is putting the once all-powerful Law and Justice (PiS) party – the main party of the coalition, which also includes smaller partner United Poland and the still smaller Republican Party – in a bind.

Keen to roll out the National Reconstruction Plan, the domestic framework to spend the recovery fund’s money, PiS has its hands tied by the internal dynamics of the coalition.

The judicial reforms are the work of United Poland, the Eurosceptic party headed by Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, who has made changes in the country’s court system a non-negotiable issue.

For Ziobro, EU attempts at making Poland walk back his reforms are nothing short of a conspiracy of Brussels elites against a member state that dared to execute its sovereign rights.

“The EU doesn’t care about rule of law! It's just an excuse to force Poland by brutal economic blackmail to agree to the transformation of the EU into a federation managed from Brussels, and practically from Berlin,” Ziobro told the newspaper Rzeczpospolita in early January.

For PiS, Ziobro’s hard-headedness about the reforms is becoming a problem that – given the justice minister’s total refusal to budge one inch – can only be solved by either waiting the rule of law row out until the next election, due in 2023, or by ditching Ziobro and his party from the coalition.

The first option is already costly. Not just because Poland is not getting the pandemic recovery fund anytime soon. Also because the EU is about to start deducting fines for keeping what it says are unlawful reforms in force from the cohesion funding for Poland under the 2021-2027 budget.

The fines are a result of a series of rulings by the EU’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which told Poland to roll back the reforms. The CJEUs orders concerned key elements of the changes: the disciplinary regime that judges are subject to and, indirectly, the National Council of the Judiciary, a judge-appointing body.

Both the disciplinary regime and the council have eroded the impartiality and independence of the Polish court system, the CJEU said.

To Poland – or more precisely to Ziobro and his collaborators in the Ministry of Justice – this constitutes the EU usurping rights it has never had. In effect, Poland has ignored the rulings by the CJEU, which eventually imposed a daily fine of €1mn for Warsaw failing to wind down the disciplinary regime.

The fine was imposed in early November and has amounted to nearly PLN400mn to date.

“The Polish rule of law situation is deadlocked – Prime Minister Morawiecki would prefer to resolve it somehow, but Minister of Justice Ziobro, on whom the parliamentary majority depends, is adamant not to take a single step back,” legal expert Jakub Jaraczewski of Reporting Democracy told bne IntelliNews.

According to Jaraczewski, Ziobro appears to be calculating that all of this burdens Morawiecki and [PiS chairman Jaroslaw] Kaczynski more than it does stick to him.

“As a result, it seems like Poland will continue the destructive cycle of having the politically controlled Constitutional Tribunal ‘invalidate’ further elements of EU law and international human rights in 2022, with the European Commission seeking to increase fines over non-compliance with CJEU decisions,” Jaraczewski said.

“Poland is set to continue the standoff with the EU until a significant political shift, such as a loss of parliamentary majority or a considerable dip in polling, happens and forces Kaczyński to act one way or another,” the legal expert added.

The polls have long shown an .

The opposition has been largely stagnant, the pooled polls also show. The biggest opposition party, the Civic Coalition is at 26%, the newcomers Polska 2050 are at 15%, followed by the far-right Konfederacja at 10%. The Left and the agrarian party PSL come next at 7% and 5%, respectively.