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Poland's highest court now has, in practice, two leaderships claiming to run it, riot police at its doors, and a president who cut short a foreign trip to intervene in person. The confrontation over the Constitutional Tribunal escalated sharply over the weekend of October 31 to November 1, when a group of judges sought to remove the court's leadership, police were deployed to the building in Warsaw, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk and President Karol Nawrocki publicly accused each other of breaking the constitutional order. According to reports from Eurotopics and other European coverage, the next flashpoint is due on Tuesday, November 3, when one of the contested judges has called a general assembly of Tribunal judges to approve the court's proposed budget for 2027.
The immediate trigger was the suspension of Tribunal President Bogdan Swieczkowski, an appointee of the previous nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) government. The Tribunal's longest-serving judge, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, then took charge of the court following the suspension, according to the account reported by Reuters and others. Nawrocki, an ally of PiS, described the move as a forcible takeover of a constitutional body and an attack on the constitutional order. Tusk defended his government's actions, saying it was seeking to restore the rule of law after years in which, in his view, PiS had captured the court. Both sides are invoking the constitution; neither side's description should be treated as a settled legal conclusion, because the dispute is precisely about who has the authority to decide.
A dispute that dates back to 2015
To understand why a court building needs riot police, you have to go back to 2015, when both the outgoing centrist government and its right-wing successor made contested appointments to the Tribunal. During PiS's subsequent eight years in power, judicial reforms raised concerns over political interference and brought Poland into prolonged conflict with European institutions over the rule of law. Reversing those reforms was among Tusk's central campaign promises before his coalition took office in 2023, but attempts to change the system through legislation have repeatedly been blocked by opposition-aligned presidents — first Andrzej Duda, now Nawrocki, who wields wide veto powers.
The current deadlock concerns five judges elected by the current parliament whom Nawrocki has refused to swear in. Those judges subsequently took their oaths without him, but the Tribunal's leadership prevented them from hearing cases. In October, the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe's constitutional advisory body, concluded that the president could not use his role in the appointment process to obstruct duly elected judges from taking office. That opinion gave Tusk's camp a powerful argument — and, to Nawrocki's camp, it changed nothing about who lawfully leads the court today.
Why Tuesday matters, and why Europe is watching
Tuesday's called assembly is a test of whether the court can function at all. If Korwin-Piotrowska's meeting proceeds and approves a budget, Tusk's government will treat it as the court working again. If the existing leadership disputes her authority and the meeting cannot proceed, the paralysis continues — and with it, a court that is supposed to act as an independent check on government and parliament, with the power to overturn laws that violate the constitution, remains unable to do its job. The European Commission has come to Tusk's defence, calling on the president to recognise the judges, while critics abroad, including France's Marine Le Pen, have denounced what they call a power grab. That split is the point: in Warsaw, this is no longer an argument about procedure. It is a fight over which Poland — the one built by PiS's judicial reforms, or the one Tusk promised to restore — gets to call its top court legitimate. Related reading: Bulgaria Elects Iliana Iotova as First Elected Female President and Gulf States Fear a Wider War as Iran Strikes Loom.