The Amendment of August 1926 to the first Polish Constitution of the Second Republic

On the political-legal plane, the direct consequence of the May coup organized by Józef Piłsudski in 1926 was an amendment of the March constitution of 1921. The above amendment was commonly referred to as the August amendment from the name of the month in which the two laws changing the constitution had been passed (2 August 1926). The core of the August amendment consisted in a strengthening of the position of the executive organs of the state at the expense of the Diet and the senate. The president obtained the right to dissolve parliament before the end of its term, following the motion of the ministers’ council. Moreover, the president obtained the prerogatives to pass resolutions with the power of parliamentary laws and obtained new budgetary prerogatives. Parliament, on the other hand, became restricted as regards its powers to pass a no confidence vote towards the Ministers’ Council or any individual minister. The political conceptions implemented by the interwar government aimed at doing away with the principle of a tri-partite division of state power in favor of a concentration of power in the hands of the state’s president. The above conception had been fully realized in the new constitution of the Republic of Poland of 1935