Poland's parliament voted Thursday to abolish the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau (CBA), a move that Prime Minister Donald Tusk's government framed as part of broader institutional reforms but that opposition lawmakers and some civil society groups warn could weaken anti-corruption oversight.
The legislation, which passed with support from the governing coalition, would dismantle the CBA and transfer its functions to other law enforcement agencies. According to sources familiar with the vote, the measure now heads to President Andrzej Duda, who has signaled his intention to veto the bill—setting up yet another constitutional confrontation between Poland's liberal government and its conservative president.
"This is not about dismantling accountability," government officials told reporters in Warsaw. "This is about restructuring our oversight bodies to make them more effective and less politicized." The Tusk administration argues that the CBA became weaponized during eight years of Law and Justice (PiS) rule, when the bureau allegedly targeted political opponents while ignoring corruption within the ruling party's ranks.
But the move has raised eyebrows in Brussels, where Poland was supposed to represent the European Union's rule-of-law success story. After years of bitter confrontation with the previous PiS government over judicial independence and democratic backsliding, the EU cautiously welcomed Tusk's return to power in late 2023. Now, barely two years into his tenure, Warsaw is eliminating an anti-corruption agency—a step that some European officials privately worry could signal Poland replacing one set of partisan institutions with another.
In Poland, as across Central Europe, history is never far from the surface—and neither is the memory of occupation. The debate over the CBA touches on deeply ingrained Polish suspicions about concentrated power and the use of security services for political ends. During the communist era, the security apparatus served the party, not the people. After 1989, Poles built new institutions meant to prevent such abuses. Whether those institutions should now be dismantled—even if they were allegedly corrupted under PiS—remains fiercely contested.
Opposition lawmakers were quick to condemn the vote. PiS representatives in the Sejm accused the government of hypocrisy, noting that Tusk's coalition had campaigned on strengthening, not weakening, anti-corruption mechanisms. "They criticized us for politicizing institutions, and now they're abolishing them entirely," one PiS deputy said.
The presidential veto, widely expected from Duda, would mark the latest clash in Poland's ongoing cohabitation crisis. Since Tusk's coalition took power, the PiS-aligned president has repeatedly blocked government legislation, while the government has moved to sideline Duda in international forums. The dynamic has created a kind of institutional paralysis on key reforms, with the Constitutional Tribunal—itself contested after years of PiS appointments—unable to serve as a neutral arbiter.
