Sovereign presidential lawfare in the populist context

This article develops the concept of “sovereign presidential lawfare” through a case study of the 2015–2024 Kamiński and Wąsik case in Poland. It reconstructs how President Andrzej Duda’s use of the pardon power, through a pre-conviction “individual abolition” in 2015, became a tool for restructuring relations between the executive and the judiciary. The analysis situates the case within a broader conflict between a normativist understanding of constitutional authority, advanced by the Supreme Court and ordinary courts, and a decisionist understanding, endorsed by the President and a politically captured Constitutional Court. Drawing on contemporary readings of Carl Schmitt, the article argues that pardon powers can be repurposed to suspend judicial processes, generate de facto immunities, and reconfigure accountability without formal constitutional amendment.The article makes three contributions. First, it identifies a subtype of presidential lawfare distinct from self-protective criminal lawfare. Second, it demonstrates how constitutionally grounded prerogatives, especially those traditionally understood as exceptional or symbolic, can operate as instruments of structural constitutional change. Third, it conceptualises this dynamic as a shift from commissarial to sovereign uses of executive power.