Poland’s Constitutional Court Crisis Deepens as President Returns Home
A judge suspended the tribunal’s top two judges on Friday night. By Saturday morning, the president had flown home, protesters were at the gates, and each side was calling the other side’s move illegal.
Poland’s fight over its top court turned into an open standoff on Friday night. A judge on the Constitutional Tribunal suspended the court’s president and his deputy. Hours later, the country’s president cut short a trip abroad and flew home to back them.
The announcement appeared on the tribunal’s website on Friday evening. Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska ordered a one-month suspension of Tribunal President Bogdan Święczkowski and Vice President Bartłomiej Sochański, and said she would take temporary charge of the court. The site then went down, leaving the full text of the order hard to verify independently.
The tribunal’s leadership rejected the move outright. Its account on social media described the suspensions as a coup d’état and said the two men remained in their posts. Święczkowski has said the same.
Outside the building in Warsaw, hundreds of protesters gathered overnight. Police said they detained three people after some demonstrators threw objects at officers and tried to break through the security fence around the court. Law and Justice leader Jarosław Kaczyński was among those who joined the protest.
The president flies home
President Karol Nawrocki was on his way to Senegal for a state visit when the news broke. He turned the plane around.
“At a moment like this, the President must be in Poland. I am cutting short my flight to Senegal. I am returning,” he wrote on X on Friday evening.
After landing, Nawrocki went to the tribunal in the early hours of Saturday, alongside Zbigniew Kapiński, the first president of the Supreme Court. He said he helped Święczkowski enter the building. On Saturday morning he said a “breach of Poland’s constitutional order” had taken place, and called the heads of the parliamentary groups to urgent talks on stabilising the situation.
His office has framed the suspension as a forcible takeover of a constitutional institution. Marcin Przydacz, a top aide to the president, told The Associated Press that Poland was dealing with a “massive constitutional crisis” caused by what he called an illegal attempt to take over an important institution.
The government’s case
Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government tells the story the other way around. It says Święczkowski repeatedly broke the law and blocked judges elected by the parliamentary majority from taking their seats at the tribunal. Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek has asked for the immunity of Święczkowski and Sochański to be lifted so criminal charges can be brought against them.
“Restoring the rule of law is our obligation,” Tusk wrote on X on Friday evening. “After years of lawlessness under PiS this is a difficult process, sometimes painful and it requires decisive action. There is no other way.”
PiS is the national-conservative Law and Justice party, which governed Poland from 2015 to 2023. Critics in Poland and the European Union accused it of imposing political control over key judicial institutions, and the EU imposed fines on Poland over the changes. Tusk’s pro-European government came to power in 2023 promising to restore the independence of the judiciary.
That effort has run into a wall at the presidency. Two successive presidents aligned with PiS have used their vetoes to block parts of it. Nawrocki, who won the presidency in 2025, has declined to swear in judges elected by the parliamentary majority, and Święczkowski has denied those judges their seats. The dispute over who counts as a lawful tribunal judge has left the court largely unable to function.
Korwin-Piotrowska is among the judges whose appointments the presidency disputes. According to reports of her order, she said the two suspended officials had obstructed the work of judges appointed by the current majority and violated judicial procedures.
As of Saturday, neither side had backed down. The government says it is repairing a court that was captured by politics. The president says the government is capturing it again, by force. The tribunal itself is now the scene of the argument, with two rival claims to its leadership and a police cordon outside its gates.
