NextFin News - Poland's central bank governor Adam Glapinski is one parliamentary vote away from suspension, and his potential removal has exposed a gap at the heart of the country's monetary machinery: if the chairman of the rate-setting council cannot convene its meetings, nobody is certain who can. The question, flagged by Monetary Policy Council member Ludwik Kotecki in an interview, is the most concrete operational risk yet to emerge from the political assault on the National Bank of Poland's leadership.
The Sejm's Constitutional Accountability Committee backed a motion on Friday to bring Glapinski before the State Tribunal on accusations that include indirectly financing the budget deficit through bond purchases in 2020-21 without proper approval from the rate-setting council. The full lower house must now vote - a decision that cannot come sooner than 21 days after deputies review the report, meaning late October at the earliest. If it passes, Poland faces an unprecedented test of whether its central bank can run its monetary policy with its governor sidelined and its own legal services left to answer who calls the meeting.
The Convening Gap: Who Calls the Meeting?
The Monetary Policy Council is composed of a chairperson - the NBP governor - plus nine members appointed in equal numbers by the president, the Sejm and the Senate, each serving six-year terms. The council meets on a pre-set calendar - the October decision was taken at its scheduled October 6-7 session - but the authority to summon those sessions belongs to the chairman. Remove the chairman, and the calendar remains but the convener may not.
Kotecki's interview is the closest thing to an official map of this terrain, and it is deliberately split between reassurance and uncertainty. On one hand, he said the situation around the NBP is unprecedented, but the potential absence of the president does not mean the central bank stops functioning. As long as the president can still convene and attend MPC meetings, the council "can work without major obstacles." If there is no chairman, a substitution system exists: one Council member chairs, and the body would "simply deliberate as nine people." Ireneusz Dabrowski, he said, has already been designated to act as chairman should the president be absent.
On the other hand, when pressed on who would actually convene the meetings if there is no president - and no deputy governors to fill the gap - Kotecki deferred to the bank's lawyers. "To the NBP legal services, first and foremost," he said, adding that these were "hypothetical considerations." That deferral is the story. A central bank is a rules-based institution; when its own council member answers a question about who can call a rate decision with "ask the legal department," the market hears uncertainty priced into sovereign risk.
The deputy-governor gap compounds the problem. In November, Vice President Adam Lipinski is due to step down, leaving the NBP management board with fewer members than the law requires. Filling the vacancy requires agreement among the NBP president, the president of Poland and the prime minister - and talks have been stalled for months. Kotecki noted that MPC members do not strictly need management-board documents to adopt resolutions, since their own knowledge and experience suffice, but the analysis prepared by NBP staff "greatly facilitates" decisions. The bank can function short-handed; the question is how well, and under whose authority.
The political calendar is tight. Committee chairman Zdzislaw Gawlik, of Prime Minister Donald Tusk's centrist coalition, said the report would go to the Sejm speaker, who sets the vote date. Zbigniew Konwinski, head of the governing Civic Coalition's parliamentary faction, said he expected a plenary vote this year and stated: "We will, of course, have the majority needed to pass the vote."
But which majority is itself contested. Under the State Tribunal Act as the coalition reads it, a resolution requires an absolute majority with at least half of the statutory 230 deputies present, and adoption results in suspension. In January 2024, however, the Constitutional Tribunal - in ruling K 23/23 - held that bringing the NBP president before the tribunal requires a three-fifths majority of the statutory number of deputies, or 276 votes, and that adoption would not suspend him automatically. The coalition lacks that threshold by more than 30 votes. The government disputes the ruling's validity, arguing the tribunal cannot create new provisions in its justification; the opposition rejects that reading. The First President of the Supreme Court, Zbigniew Kapinski, who presides over the State Tribunal, may review the motion on procedural grounds before it proceeds.
The Charges: Eight Allegations, One Historical First
This is the first time in the history of Poland's Third Republic that a parliamentary committee has recommended bringing a sitting central bank president before the State Tribunal. The committee's initial motion dates to March 2024; it has held 32 meetings and heard more than 50 witnesses, including MPC members Joanna Tyrowicz and Ludwik Kotecki, financial-supervision chief Jacek Jastrzebski, former PKO BP CEO Zbigniew Jagiello and former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. Glapinski was not questioned and did not exercise his right to respond to the allegations.
"This entire action, announced during the previous election campaign, has absolutely no basis," Glapinski said at a press conference following the council's October meeting. "It is detrimental to Poland's internal interests and, unfortunately, could have a very significant negative impact on foreign relations. (...) The central bank will not yield to any political pressure."
The committee's report, according to lawmakers who have seen it, contains eight specific allegations. The two most consequential concern the bond purchases in 2020-21, conducted jointly with the government, the Polish Development Fund and BGK state bank, which the motion says indirectly financed the budget deficit by at least 144 billion zloty - roughly $36 billion - without proper authorization from the Monetary Policy Council. The motion also cites currency interventions that partially weakened the zloty without the NBP management board's authorization, interest-rate cuts during the election campaign, obstruction of document access for council and board members, the announcement of a 6 billion zloty profit payment to the budget in August 2023 despite a projected loss, acceptance of quarterly bonuses irrespective of performance, misrepresentation of some members' voices in meeting minutes, and public campaigning for the Law and Justice party in breach of the constitution's apoliticality principle.
Gawlik told reporters: "The committee found all the allegations to be well-founded... I see no grounds or circumstances that would cast doubt on the justification for bringing the governor before the State Tribunal." PiS deputy committee chairwoman Iwona Arent said she suspected the government would aim to suspend Glapinski and that her party could seek recourse from international institutions that guard central bank independence. The European Central Bank declined to comment.
The Policy Backdrop: Above the Band, With a Hike on the Table
The timing sharpens the stakes. At its October 6-7 meeting, the Monetary Policy Council held all rates unchanged: the reference rate at 3.75%, the Lombard rate at 4.25% and the deposit rate at 3.25%. But the pause was taken above the bank's inflation target. Poland's medium-term inflation target is 2.5% with a tolerance band of plus or minus one percentage point, putting the upper bound at 3.5%. September's CPI flash estimate came in at 4.0% year-on-year, up from 3.4% in August - above the band - driven mainly by fuel prices for private transport, which rose 36.1% year-on-year and 9.2% month-on-month in September.
Glapinski said there was no indication yet that higher fuel prices were spreading into the wider economy, and that a rate increase in November was "possible, but I don't foresee it." He added that the council had authorized him to say it stood ready to act if energy-boosted inflation spilled over into other sectors. Market economists are pricing a tighter path: mBank now forecasts three 25-basis-point increases, taking the reference rate to 4.50% by March 2027. In late September, Kotecki said the council was nearing a serious debate about rate increases, and that November's new macroeconomic projection could provide grounds for one or two 25-basis-point hikes if inflation is projected to exceed 4% in the coming year.
The council has already shown it can act without unanimity. In June, a motion to raise rates by a full percentage point was defeated with only one member, Joanna Tyrowicz, in favor and Glapinski among the opponents - a split published in the bank's own voting record. Nine members can vote. The unresolved issue is whether they can be convened, on whose authority, and with what legal cover.
Markets are already charging for the risk. Poland's 10-year government bond yield reached 6.35% on October 9, up 0.01 percentage points on the session, 0.08 points higher over the month and 0.86 points higher than a year earlier. A sovereign yield near multi-year highs while the central bank's leadership is under siege reflects two premiums in one price: inflation moving the wrong way, and uncertainty about who will be authorized to stop it.
Cyclical Politics, Structural Precedent
The trigger is cyclical: a governing coalition exploiting a constitutional gray zone to remove a political opponent's appointee. Cyclical forces revert - the coalition's term will end, courts may reassert themselves, a future Sejm could reverse course. If this episode were only about Glapinski, the market disturbance would be a short-lived risk premium that fades once the legal question is settled.
But the mechanism at work is structural. Central bank independence survives not because officials are well-intentioned but because the procedures that appoint, suspend and hold governors accountable sit above the political fray. When a governing coalition can attempt to suspend a governor by simple majority while the constitutional court says 276 votes are required - and while the same court says suspension does not follow automatically - the procedure itself becomes a political instrument. Future governments of any party will have a precedent. The damage is not to one governor's tenure; it is to the rule that tenure is secure.
The second-order channel runs through the currency and the yield curve, not just the policy meeting. A contested suspension weakens the zloty; a weaker zloty raises import prices; higher import prices feed the inflation the council is trying to contain. That forces the council into a classic emerging-market trap: tighten into political fire, or tolerate higher inflation. The irony is sharp. The coalition's stated aim is accountability for deficit financing, but the market consequence of the process is a higher risk premium on the very sovereign debt that finances that deficit.
The Counter-Thesis: The Council Can Still Function
The strongest case against alarm is that Poland's central bank is a staffed institution, not a one-person operation, and its own council member says so. Nine of ten seats remain filled; a substitute chair has been designated; the council meets on a published calendar; and its members can adopt resolutions even without management-board documents. The committee process itself - with its 21-day review period and speaker-set vote date - is slow enough for markets and lawyers to adjust. From this vantage point, Kotecki's "unprecedented" framing is a warning shot to the government about the costs of suspension, not a prediction of paralysis. The bank kept rates unchanged at its October meeting while the probe concluded, and nothing in the statute book says nine members cannot set monetary policy.
There is real weight to that view. The substitution mechanism Kotecki described - a Council member chairing in the chairman's absence - is written into the council's rules. And the Constitutional Tribunal's ruling, if enforced, means Glapinski is not suspended merely by the Sejm's vote; he stays in office unless the State Tribunal later bars him from managerial positions. In that scenario, the chairman convenes the meetings as before, and the operational question never arises.
But the counter-thesis underestimates the chilling effect on the institution's own legal certainty. Even if nine members can physically sit in a room, every decision they take while the governor's status is contested rests on a chain of authority that two state organs describe differently. The coalition says an absolute majority suspends the governor; the Constitutional Tribunal says it does not. The council's legal services are being asked to answer who convenes the meeting; a deferred answer in a rules-based institution is itself a form of risk. The signal that would prove the alarmists wrong is specific and observable: if the Sejm passes the resolution and the MPC holds its next scheduled meeting on time - convened under the Dabrowski substitution mechanism, with a published resolution and no procedural objection from NBP legal services - and the 10-year yield narrows rather than widens, then the institutional shock was contained.
What Comes Next
The calendar now drives the story. The Sejm cannot vote sooner than 21 days after deputies receive the report, placing the decision in late October at the earliest; Sejm Speaker Wlodzimierz Czarzasty sets the date. Government lawmakers expect a plenary vote this year. The MPC's next inflection point is its November 3-4 meeting, which coincides with the release of the updated macroeconomic projection and with Vice President Lipinski's expected departure from the management board.
The base case is that the coalition secures its majority, the resolution passes under contested legal authority, and Glapinski fights his suspension through the State Tribunal while the MPC operates under the designated substitute chair. In that scenario, expect the zloty to remain under pressure, the 10-year yield to hold a premium over regional peers, and the council to delay any hawkish move until its leadership status is resolved. The upside case is that the Constitutional Tribunal's three-fifths ruling is enforced, the resolution fails for lack of 276 votes, and Glapinski remains in office - a short-lived market rally that does not erase the precedent that the attempt was made. The downside case is a contested suspension followed by a council that convenes late or under legal challenge, forcing the NBP to operate in caretaker mode through the inflationary turn of the cycle.
The falsifying signal for the operational-hurdle thesis is narrow: within one meeting cycle of any suspension, the MPC convenes on schedule under the substitute-chair mechanism, publishes an uncontested resolution, and Poland's 10-year yield falls back toward 6.0%. Until then, the burden of proof rests on the institutions - and on the legal services Kotecki says must answer who calls the meeting.
Poland's central bank is about to learn whether independence is protected by law or by the willingness of politicians to obey it. The market, for now, is betting on the latter.
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