Poland – Better late than never, the saying goes. Just a few days after the October 15 elections in Poland, when it was already known that the incumbent United Right coalition led by Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party had little chance of finding a coalition partner to make up for the loss of its absolute majority in the Sejm, outgoing Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro announced he was taking the EU ban on combustion engine to the country’s Constitution Tribunal.
“The European Union, together with the new government that is forming, wants to deprive Poles of the right to decide what kind of cars they want to drive. It wants to take away the freedom of Poles to decide whether they want to drive cars with internal combustion engines, diesel engines, petrol engines, or whether they should only buy cars with electric motors,” Ziobro said at a press conference held on October 20.
In March 2025, it was decided at the EU level, through a majority vote in the EU Council, that a total ban on the sale of new cars equipped with combustion engines, except, at the request of Germany, for those using “climate-neutral” fuel only, would apply from 2035 onward. Poland was the only member state to vote against this ban while Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria abstained.
“Non-transparent and informal discussions where Germany pushes for solutions that mainly benefit its market shows that this has nothing to do with a fair transition”, Poland’s climate minister, Anna Moskwa, tweeted at the time.
Only 3.6% of new cars in Poland were fully electric or hybrid in 2021, which is one of the lowest proportions in the whole EU-27.
The number of such cars registered in Poland reached 67,097 in January 2023, which was 63% more than a year earlier but remained far below government targets.
In fact, the reason why Ziobro referred this issue to the Polish Constitutional Tribunal after the governing camp’s election defeat was precisely because he knew the left-liberal coalition led by Donald Tusk was soon going to form Poland’s next government and that it would probably not oppose the transition to electric cars.
“As Attorney General and Minister of Justice, I have consistently opposed the folly of EU policies that strike at the basic interests and rights of Poles, restricting their freedom (…) and leading to traffic exclusion. Lots of Poles will not be able to afford to buy an electric car”, he said when he announced the referral.
In the future, this could be yet another front opening between Poland’s constitutional court and the European Court of Justice, if the Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw considers the 2035 ban on cars with combustion engines to be in violation of the constitutional rights of Poles.