Poland has plunged into a constitutional crisis after a political battle between President Karol Nawrocki, an ally of the conservative-nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk, leader of the centrist, pro-European camp, escalated into a direct confrontation over control of the Constitutional Tribunal. The tribunal reviews the constitutionality of laws and government actions, a role roughly comparable to that of Israel's High Court of Justice.
The roots of the crisis go back to 2015, when the outgoing parliament and the incoming PiS majority each appointed their own judges to the tribunal. The PiS government's subsequent overhaul of the judiciary triggered a prolonged clash with the European Union. After Tusk returned to power in 2023, his government began working to reverse those changes and replace judges appointed under his predecessors. Nawrocki, elected president in 2025, opposes the moves.
At the center of the standoff are eight new judges elected by the Polish parliament to the 15-member tribunal this year. Nawrocki accepted the oaths of only three of them. The other five were sworn in at parliamentary ceremonies, but both the president and the tribunal's president, Bogdan Święczkowski, a former deputy justice minister under PiS, refuse to recognize them, blocking them from taking up their duties.
From the perspective of Tusk's government, this is an attempt to protect judges aligned with the previous political camp and prevent the restoration of the court's independence. The government argues that parliament is the body authorized to select the judges, and that the president has no right to block the appointments by refusing to administer the oath.
The president and his supporters, on the other hand, claim the government is trying to seize control of the court through political appointments, circumventing constitutional rules. In their view, the fact that parliament chose new judges does not give the government license to forcibly change the institution's leadership.
The result is an extraordinary situation in which judges chosen by parliament say they hold lawful appointments but cannot exercise their authority, while the court's existing leadership refuses to step aside.
Confrontation reaches a peak: court leadership suspended
On Friday evening, the crisis escalated dramatically. Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, one of the five parliament-appointed judges the president refuses to recognize, announced a one-month suspension of Święczkowski and his deputy, Bartłomiej Sochański, and declared that she was assuming acting leadership of the tribunal. She based her claim to seniority on her overall judicial career, which began in 1995, rather than on her time at the tribunal, and that claim is itself disputed. The tribunal's existing leadership rejected the move, insisting that Święczkowski remains its president and that Korwin-Piotrowska is not a tribunal judge.
The move sparked outrage on the right, which called it an illegal takeover of the court. Supporters of Tusk's government presented it as an effort to dismantle a mechanism that had long paralyzed the institution. Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek, who also serves as prosecutor general, backed Korwin-Piotrowska and moved to have Święczkowski's immunity from prosecution lifted.
President Nawrocki, who was en route to an official visit in Senegal, turned his plane around and returned to Warsaw. He condemned the events as a breach of public order and "a forcible takeover of a constitutional body."
Meanwhile, hundreds of PiS supporters, including party leader Jarosław Kaczyński, gathered outside the court in Warsaw. Police deployed in force and detained three protesters after some threw objects at officers and tried to break through the security fence. Shortly after midnight, the president arrived at the building himself, accompanied by Supreme Court First President Zbigniew Kapiński, and said he had helped the suspended court president get inside, a scene that illustrated just how deep the rift between the camps has become.
