WARSAW — The battle over who rules Poland is being fought in front of a cream-colored palace in central Warsaw — surrounded by police and protesters — that houses the country’s top constitutional court.
Liberal, pro-EU Prime Minister Donald Tusk wants to roll back changes to the Constitutional Tribunal made by the previous nationalist right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party government, while President Karol Nawrocki is fighting — even physically — to keep the PiS-aligned judges in charge.
The government insists the court must be overhauled to restore rule of law and conform with EU norms on impartiality, while Nawrocki’s supporters accuse Tusk of backing a coup.
The clash comes to a head on Tuesday, when the eight judges backed by Tusk’s ruling parliamentary coalition plan to hold a meeting to approve the tribunal’s budget and consider disciplinary proceedings against its president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and his deputy, Bartłomiej Sochański.
They need a quorum of 10 of the court’s 15 judges to be present — meaning they need to peel away at least two justices chosen under the previous PiS government that ruled from 2015 to 2023.
The fight over the control of the tribunal is helping bring right-wing opposition parties together ahead of next year’s parliamentary election.
The crowd outside the tribunal protesting against Tusk’s government included PiS co-founder Jarosław Kaczyński alongside Grzegorz Braun, an extreme-right Polexit campaigner and antisemite whom Kaczyński had previously ruled out governing with. This time round, they took a selfie. Other right-wing leaders at the rally included former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and libertarian Sławomir Mentzen.
“There are plenty of differences between our programs. But ending Prime Minister Tusk’s government is the fundamental common goal,” Anna Bryłka, vice president of Mentzen’s Confederation party, told POLITICO.
Tusk’s Civic Coalition leads POLITICO’s Poll of Polls, but its smaller partners might not make it into the next parliament, opening the way for PiS and other right-wing parties, provided their leaders are able to work together.
The scale of the crisis could also galvanize Tusk’s supporters, who have been disappointed by the government’s failure to move rapidly to restore the rule of law.
“These elections will be crucial for Polish democracy. If a [right-wing] coalition came to power, they would eliminate independent institutions that could hold them to account, and take Poland out of the European Union, something they have openly discussed,” Borys Budka, a Civic Coalition member of the European Parliament and a former justice minister, told POLITICO.
Kaczyński last week raised the possibility of a Polexit.
“The crisis does provide an opportunity for both sides to sort of rally around one or the other,” said Ben Stanley, a political scientist with Warsaw’s SWPS University.
Troubled tribunal
The crisis dates back over a decade.
In October 2015, the Civic Platform-led parliamentary majority elected five Constitutional Tribunal judges — three to fill existing vacancies and two for seats coming open after a parliamentary election set for December. It was an attempt to do an end-run around PiS, which was leading in the polls and which won the election.
Although the tribunal later ruled that the two extra judges were improperly chosen, the new PiS majority went much further by declaring all five selections void, electing five replacements and having them sworn in by PiS-aligned President Andrzej Duda.
The legitimacy of the three new justices chosen to replace the properly elected ones was called into question.
“An independent Constitutional Tribunal is an obstacle to authoritarian rule. That is why Kaczyński began dismantling the judiciary in 2015 by targeting the tribunal first. If he returned to power, he would do exactly the same thing,” Budka said.
Over the following eight years, PiS reshaped the court through contested judicial appointments, leadership changes and procedural restrictions. In December 2025, the EU’s top court ruled that the tribunal did not meet the standards of an independent and impartial court because of irregularities in appointments made a decade earlier.
Tusk returned to power in 2023 promising to restore the rule of law, but his efforts were thwarted by Duda and Nawrocki, who won the presidency in 2025 with PiS’s backing.
The immediate crisis stems from Nawrocki’s decision to pick and choose which of the eight judges appointed by the parliament he would swear in — which critics say is blatant violation of the constitution.
Święczkowski, the tribunal’s president, refused to let the new judges into the court’s building.
On Friday, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, citing her status as the judge with the longest service, suspended Święczkowski and his deputy Sochański.
Nawrocki reacted by abandoning an official trip to Senegal and turning his flight around over Spain on Friday to return to Warsaw. He arrived at the tribunal at 1 a.m. on Saturday. Footage showed him forcing his way in past Korwin-Piotrowska. The president’s camp insists it was Korwin-Piotrowska and other judges who had made unlawful physical contact with the president.
Święczkowski, who vows to come to the Tribunal’s gates daily to demand to be let in, insists he remains president and rejects the authority of the judges seeking control.
“Resolving the conflict is simple and possible without constitutional changes,” Tusk wrote Monday. He said Nawrocki should recognize judges lawfully elected by parliament, as required by the constitution, and allow them to take up their duties at the tribunal.
Tusk also accused Nawrocki of choosing a confrontation that could cost Poland dearly. He added that the democratic state would not yield to violence, regardless of “how powerful the external forces” supporting PiS and the far right might be.
The right hopes to use the crisis to oust Tusk.
“The solution is very simple. You resign, the president calls a new election and the people decide … You will not intimidate us, and we will not back down,” PiS deputy leader Przemysław Czarnek responded.
Zbigniew Bogucki, the head of Nawrocki’s chancellery, on Monday called the conflict “a battle for Poland’s democracy.”
Stanley, the political scientist, said the tussle over the control of the tribunal may only temporarily unite right-wing parties.
“There’s a narrative that has started to emerge that this is now the moment when everyone gets behind Nawrocki and PiS but there’s a lot of time to go until the next election,” he said. “And these are parties which are in many respects even more ideologically heterogeneous than the current governing coalition parties.”
Crisis over top court shapes Poland’s battle lines before 2027 election
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