In the Name of Primacy
In 1973, Pierre Pescatore noted that “[P]rimacy is an ‘existential requirement’ of EU law”. The Opinion of AG Spielmann in Case C-448/23 (Commission v. Poland), delivered on 11 March 2025, opens with this harsh observation. His difficult task is to frame in legal terms the two essentially political rulings delivered by the Polish Constitutional Tribunal in 2021, where – notoriously – the “captured” domestic court refused to adhere to the most basic principles governing the relationship between national and EU law. This requires adjustments in the current vocabulary of the Luxembourg judges.
