ANALYSIS | Understanding Poland’s current constitutional crisis

As much of Europe has slipped into moral and social decay, liberalizing abortion, assisted suicide, and LGBT ideology and replacing the native European populations with increasingly hostile foreigners from the Middle East and global south, Poland has stood as one of the few European nations to vigorously defend its borders and uphold Christian moral principles in law and policy.

In late October, European Union-aligned Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk tried to put an end to the country’s stand against decay. On Oct. 30, Tusk’s deputies barred the leaders of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal from entering their courthouse, in a move Polish President Karol Nawrocki characterized as a coup.

The appearance of masked riot police blocking the nation’s top constitutional judges from entering the courthouse in Warsaw inspired protests and captured international headlines. So what happened in Poland, and what does it mean for the nation’s long-standing conservative policies?

Lame ducks

The instigating factor for Tusk’s judicial coup is rooted in a 2015 dispute over appointments to the tribunal. At the time, Tusk’s party, the Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska or PO), was in its final months of power in the lower house of Poland’s parliament, the Sejm. In Poland, the Sejm appoints the members of the tribunal, who are then sworn in by the president and serve nine-year terms.

In November 2015, the outgoing PO majority appointed three judges to the tribunal to replace three retiring judges. While the tribunal ruled that these appointments were legal, it determined that two additional appointments made by the PO-controlled lame duck Sejm in December were invalid. The right-wing populist Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość or PiS), which won the 2015 elections, then appointed its own judges to all five seats. President Andrzej Duda, a member of PiS, swore in the judges appointed by his own party.

Under PiS, the Sejm introduced new legislation to correct confusion and irregularity in the tribunal appointment process.

PiS would remain the dominant political party in Poland for nearly a decade, having become the first political party in the country to win an outright majority in the legislature since the fall of Soviet communism, and enacted a number of judicial reforms and legislative measures to protect Poland’s socially conservative values.

Tusk, who left his position as prime minister in 2014 to serve in a leadership role in the EU, returned to power in 2023, when PO formed a coalition with other opposition parties, including Poland’s far-left, and defeated PiS in that year’s elections, making Tusk prime minister again. PO, now known as the Civic Coalition (Koalicja Obywatelska or KO), promised to “restore the rule of law,” casting PiS reforms as authoritarian abuses of power.

KO stopped publishing rulings and orders from the tribunal, alleging that the PiS-appointed judges were invalidly or improperly appointed. Duda and his successor, President Karol Nawrocki of PiS, vetoed many of the Sejm’s legislative efforts to retake the tribunal and oust PiS-appointed judges.

Constitutional crisis

By early 2026, multiple seats on the tribunal were vacant as judges’ terms expired. The KO-dominated Sejm appointed new judges. Several of the judges were sworn in by Nawrocki, but the remainder were not. Nawrocki cited multiple procedural and constitutional issues with the nominations and appointments. The Sejm conducted its own swearing-in ceremonies instead, which tribunal President Bogdan Święczkowski refused to recognize as valid, since they were not administered by the president, as demanded by Polish law.

One of those sworn in by the legislature was Anna Korwin-Piotrowska. On Oct. 30, Korwin-Piotrowska issued an order placing Święczkowski and Tribunal Vice President Bartłomiej Sochański on a mandatory leave of absence and declaring herself the new president of the tribunal. Tusk’s Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek likewise moved to lift the judicial immunity afforded to constitutional judges for Święczkowski and Sochański, alleging potential criminal actions by refusing to recognize the KO-appointed judges as legitimate.

Korwin-Piotrowska and the other KO-appointed judges entered the tribunal courthouse, escorted by national security police, via an entrance linked to Tusk’s offices, after which riot police surrounded the building. The officers wore masks and covered their badge numbers and names.

The coup

Święczkowski and Sochański condemned the move as a coup. Święczkowski himself attempted to enter the courthouse but was physically blocked by riot police.

“An unlawful takeover of the Constitutional Tribunal's website has occurred,” Święczkowski and Sochański wrote in an X post, following the publication of Korwin-Piotrowska’s order on the tribunal’s website. “Ms. Anna Korwin-Piotrowska is not a judge of the Constitutional Tribunal. All persons participating in these actions are committing the crime of a coup d'état.”

Supreme Court President Zbigniew Kapiński wrote in an Oct. 30 statement, “It is with the utmost outrage and utter disapproval that I receive information about the actions taken today against the Constitutional Tribunal, in particular the dispatch of police officers to its headquarters.”

“These events are unprecedented in a democratic state ruled by law and raise fundamental concerns about their compliance with the fundamental principles of the political system of the Republic of Poland,” he continued. “It is unacceptable for disputes concerning the functioning of a constitutional body of state to become a pretext for taking actions that effectively paralyze it and strip it of any authority. This is a particularly dangerous precedent, undermining the foundations of a democratic state ruled by law.”

When Tusk and the KO-appointed judges took over the tribunal headquarters, Nawrocki was on a plane en route to a summit in Senegal. He quickly returned to Warsaw. On his way back to Poland, Nawrocki had been told by Korwin-Piotrowska not to enter the tribunal headquarters; instead, she suggested that she be invited to the Presidential Palace.

At the Presidential Palace, Nawrocki met with Święczkowski and Sochański before proceeding to the tribunal headquarters. Police allowed him to enter the building, but denied access to his presidential protective detail. Korwin-Piotrowska and fellow KO-appointed judges Maciej Berek and Krystian Markiewicz attempted to physically prevent the president from entering the building. Once inside, Nawrocki refused negotiations with the KO-appointed judges, instead telling them, “You are not judges” of the tribunal. He secured entrance to the building for Sochański, stayed until 5 a.m. local time the morning of Oct. 31, and left.

Political deadlock

On Nov. 3, Korwin-Piotrowska convened a General Assembly of the KO-appointed judges at the tribunal headquarters, where riot police still stand guard outside. They advanced legal proceedings against Święczkowski and Sochański, who in turn called the meeting illegitimate, arguing that Korwin-Piotrowska and the others have no judicial authority and that the assembly was nothing more than a social gathering.

As of time of publication, there is no resolution to the crisis. KO still claims that the appointment and function of Korwin-Piotrowska and her cohorts is legitimate, while Nawrocki, Święczkowski, PiS, and numerous Polish politicians, judges, legal scholars, and lawyers’ associations argue otherwise.

“Restoring the rule of law is our duty. After years of PiS-led lawlessness, this is a difficult process, sometimes painful, and it requires decisive action. There is no other way,” Tusk said in an X post in response to protests outside the tribunal headquarters.

He faulted Nawrocki and Polish right-wing political groups for not recognizing the legitimacy of the KO-appointed judges, claiming that Nawrocki “is choosing forceful confrontation, which could cost Poland very dearly.”

“A democratic state under the rule of law cannot yield to violence, no matter how powerful external forces support the attack by PiS,” he added. “And it will not yield.”

At a Nov. 3 meeting of the Polish National Security Council, Nawrocki publicly called on Tusk to remove police forces from outside the tribunal headquarters and withdraw his insistence that the KO-appointed judges are functioning legitimately.

Sitting across from Tusk, Nawrocki said that the prime minister’s attempted coup amounted to a “serious constitutional crisis that cannot leave us indifferent: in a situation where the most serious allegations concerning the unlawful nature of the government’s actions against the Constitutional Tribunal proved to be well-founded.”

“In case of every police officer deployed before the tribunal, in case of all illegal actions, such as the suspension of judges, unlawful orders and entering the premises of the Constitutional Tribunal through the side entrance of the Prime Minister’s Office, full responsibility for these actions rests with one man: the man present in this room, at whom I am smiling, though I cannot say I understand, approve of, or support his actions,” the president continued. “That man is Prime Minister Donald Tusk.”

Why?

Tusk’s attempted judicial coup is not only a mere power grab by a Polish politician, observers and critics say, but also an effort toward an aggressive takeover of a Polish state organ and the Polish economy by the EU.

According to Polish Member of the European Parliament Dominik Tarczyński, a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists party, Tusk, the former President of the EU Council, is loyal to the EU over his own nation. The attempted takeover of the tribunal is a means “to get rid of the Polish currency, bring us into the eurozone, and eliminate our secure borders.”

Tarczyński alleged that Germany, the economic powerhouse of the EU, is crippled by mass immigration and is pressing Tusk to open Poland’s borders to some of the millions of Middle Eastern refugees Germany has accepted over the last decade.

Furthermore, Poland is one of the only remaining member states of the EU not to use the EU currency, the euro, but its own currency, the złoty. Poland’s constitution mandates use of the złoty, which is backed by Poland’s gold reserves, among the largest in the EU. The złoty is “our constitutionally protected currency,” Tarczyński explained. “They have to change the Constitution to replace it, and without the Constitutional Tribunal, they cannot do that.”

Since KO does not have the two-thirds majority in the Sejm needed to amend the constitution, Tusk and his allies are allegedly relying on the tribunal to rule that the party can amend the constitution with a much smaller majority.

Control over its own currency allows Poland to address trade imbalances by devaluing its own currency. Just as importantly, maintaining its own currency allows Poland to keep its substantial gold reserves. If the country were to join the economic eurozone and adopt the euro, it would have to hand over — at minimum — nearly 3.4 billion złoty in gold to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany, as capital contribution.

National Bank of Poland President Adam Glapiński has opposed Tusk’s efforts to join the economic eurozone and transfer Polish gold to Germany. The Sejm is slated to vote later this month on referring Glapiński to the State Tribunal, a court that rules on the constitutional liability of people holding the highest offices of state, for prosecution.

Paul McCarthy, a senior research fellow for European Affairs at the Heritage Foundation, emphasized that the EU wages lawfare against conservative governments, including Poland under PiS rule, but “when you have a left-liberal government like that of Donald Tusk doing what it is doing, which is a constitutional coup against an independent legal institution, Brussels is completely fine with this.”

He added, “As Americans, we should be for a sovereign Poland, we should be for the Polish people, and not with the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.”