Constitutional Tribunal upholds deputies claim over local election law

The Constitutional Tribunal has ruled that the amendments made to electoral law by the Senate breach their powers granted under the constitution. The c hanges were based on calculating the number of seats in local government ac cording to the number of votes, based on the d'Hondt method, which favors l arger political groups. However this ruling does not mean that the old regu lations are still in force, so parliament has to amend the electoral law im mediately. The way these amendments were made were questioned by deputies f rom several opposition parties and even by the Polish Peasants Party (PSL), the Democratic Left Alliances' (SLD) coalition partner. According to Deputy Sejm Speaker Janusz Wojciechowski and Przemyslaw Gosiewski, from the Law and Justice party, the Senate's amendment changes the content of the bill passed by the Sejm, so that it is not an amendment but a separate initiative that must follow normal legislative proceedings, and cannot be passed as an amen dment. (Rzeczpospolita, p. A5) P.W.