Polish President Karol Nawrocki was flying toward Senegal when events in Warsaw became serious enough for him to turn the plane around. Back home, police had surrounded the Constitutional Tribunal, protesters were gathering outside its gates and the leadership of one of Poland’s most important courts had been thrown into dispute.
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The entrance to Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw, now at the centre of an escalating constitutional struggle between the government and the presidency. Photo: Adrian Grycuk / CC BY-SA 3.0 PL.
The confrontation began after Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, the longest-serving judge on Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, announced the suspension of the court’s president, Bogdan Święczkowski, a former deputy justice minister from the era of the national-conservative Law and Justice government. Święczkowski had resisted seating judges chosen by the current parliamentary majority, while Nawrocki had separately refused to swear in several nominees backed by parliament.
Within hours, the legal dispute had become a political crisis. Supporters of the opposition Law and Justice party gathered outside the tribunal, some protesters broke through barriers and objects were thrown at police. Three people were detained. Jarosław Kaczyński, the veteran leader of Law and Justice and one of the most influential figures in Polish politics, joined politicians accusing Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government of attacking the constitutional order.
Tusk, the pro-European prime minister who returned to power in 2023 after defeating Law and Justice, describes the same struggle in almost opposite terms. His government says it is trying to restore judicial independence after eight years in which European institutions repeatedly accused Law and Justice of politicising the courts.
The result is a conflict in which both sides say they are defending the constitution from the other.
That distinction matters because Poland’s current crisis is no longer simply a disagreement between a government and an opposition over taxes, social policy or foreign affairs. Increasingly, the two camps disagree over which judges are legitimate, which institutions can exercise authority and which interpretation of the constitution should prevail when those institutions collide.
For a country that has become one of Europe’s most important military and economic powers, that is an unusually fundamental dispute.
The court crisis did not begin this week
The roots of the confrontation go back to 2015, when Law and Justice returned to power and began reshaping Poland’s judicial system.
The party argued that the courts were dominated by an unaccountable post-communist legal elite and needed democratic reform. Its critics said the changes gave politicians greater influence over judges and weakened the separation of powers.
The Constitutional Tribunal became one of the first battlegrounds. Law and Justice attempted to install judges in seats that opponents argued had already been lawfully filled, beginning a dispute that expanded into the National Council of the Judiciary, the Supreme Court and disciplinary rules governing judges.
The European Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union later challenged several elements of the reforms. Billions of euros in European funding were held up amid concerns over the rule of law, and Poland spent years in confrontation with Brussels.
When Tusk’s coalition won the 2023 parliamentary election, restoring judicial independence became one of its defining promises.
Yet reversing the system has proved far harder than campaigning against it.
Officials appointed during the Law and Justice years often hold constitutionally protected terms. Removing them can therefore look like institutional repair to one side and a political purge to the other. Judges appointed under contested procedures have issued rulings, participated in cases and become embedded in the legal system, making a complete reset virtually impossible without creating new uncertainty.
Tusk inherited a state that his supporters believed had been politically captured, but he also inherited legal limits on how quickly that state could be changed.
That contradiction now sits at the centre of Polish politics.
Karol Nawrocki changed the balance of power
The election of Karol Nawrocki as president in 2025 made Tusk’s task considerably harder.
Nawrocki, a conservative nationalist backed by Law and Justice, defeated the candidate supported by Tusk’s political camp and entered office with a nationwide electoral mandate of his own.
Poland’s presidency is not merely ceremonial. The president can veto legislation, participates in judicial appointments and can force the government to find larger parliamentary majorities if it wants to override his objections.
That created two competing centres of political legitimacy.
Tusk controls the government and a parliamentary majority. Nawrocki can argue that he was also directly elected by the Polish public and has a constitutional duty to block changes he considers unlawful.
The relationship quickly turned confrontational. Nawrocki has vetoed parts of the government’s judicial agenda and refused to swear in some judges selected by parliament. The government, meanwhile, has accused the president and officials connected to the previous Law and Justice administration of deliberately paralysing institutions that the current majority is trying to rebuild.
The latest Constitutional Tribunal crisis is therefore not an isolated incident. It is the most dramatic expression so far of a larger constitutional stalemate created by divided political control.
The disagreement is now about who gets to define legality
The danger in this kind of confrontation is that each new procedural move produces a competing claim of illegality.
When the government moves against officials appointed during the Law and Justice era, the opposition says Tusk is violating constitutional protections. When those officials prevent judges chosen by the current parliament from taking their seats, the government says unelected holdovers are obstructing democratic authority.
Both arguments can sound internally coherent.
That is what makes the dispute difficult to resolve through ordinary politics.
Tusk cannot simply ignore rulings and institutions he dislikes while continuing to claim that he is restoring the rule of law. Nawrocki and Law and Justice, however, cannot easily demand full respect for every existing judicial arrangement when many of those arrangements were themselves criticised by European courts and institutions.
The question becomes circular: which authority is legitimate enough to decide which other authority is legitimate?
Poland has been trying to answer that question for more than a decade.
Abortion has exposed the same institutional problem
The consequences are not confined to lawyers and judges.
On October 22, hundreds of demonstrators gathered in Warsaw and protests were held in more than 20 Polish cities and towns demanding broader access to legal abortion.
Many of those protesters had helped create the political momentum that brought Tusk’s coalition to power in 2023. They expected the defeat of Law and Justice to lead to a significant relaxation of Poland’s abortion restrictions, among the strictest in the European Union.
That has not happened.
Poland allows abortion only in limited circumstances, including when a pregnancy results from a crime or threatens the life or health of the woman. A 2020 Constitutional Tribunal ruling during the Law and Justice era removed severe foetal abnormalities as a legal basis for abortion, triggering some of the largest demonstrations in modern Polish history.
Tusk’s coalition promised change but remains internally divided. More liberal parties favour broader access, while conservative members of the governing alliance are unwilling to support abortion on request.
Parliament approved two measures in October intended to ease parts of the existing regime, but President Nawrocki is expected to resist substantial liberalisation.
The abortion issue therefore reproduces the larger political structure of the country. An electorate can change parliament, but the president can block legislation; the government can promise reform, but coalition partners can dilute it; and court rulings made under the previous political order continue to shape daily life years later.
For many Polish women, the constitutional argument is not abstract. It determines which medical decisions are legal.
October also brought a different kind of insecurity
While politicians were fighting over the courts, Poland experienced an unusually tense month in domestic security.
On October 11, authorities said they had received information about a possible attack on Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz.
Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński later said police had detained a man in his sixties in southern Poland suspected of planning an attack. Security officials described the information as extremely serious and said investigators had traced the suspect partly through online activity.
The case arrived only days after a series of violent incidents at schools.
On October 7, a 19-year-old student attacked people with a machete at a vocational school in Ostrołęka, injuring students, teachers and bystanders. A homemade explosive device was also reportedly discovered in his backpack.
Further attacks and online threats triggered rumours of a coordinated “Bloody Friday” campaign against schools. Authorities said they found no evidence of such an organised operation, but the fear was enough to produce an extraordinary police response.
By October 9, thousands of officers had visited schools across the country, dozens of schools were temporarily closed and scores of people had been detained in connection with online threats.
These incidents were not shown to be part of a single political or foreign-directed campaign, and authorities warned against spreading unsupported rumours. But they contributed to an atmosphere in which questions of political violence, online radicalisation and national security were suddenly present at the same time as the constitutional confrontation.
Russia is the other shadow over Polish politics
Poland’s domestic arguments are unfolding beside the largest war in Europe since 1945.
The country borders Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and has become one of the central logistical and military states supporting Ukraine.
For Warsaw, Russia is not an abstract foreign-policy problem. It is the strategic threat around which much of Poland’s defence policy has been reorganised.
Poland now spends a larger share of its economy on defence than any other NATO member. According to the International Monetary Fund, military spending had risen from 2.2% of GDP in 2021 to an estimated 4.5% in 2025, driven largely by purchases of new weapons and efforts to replace equipment transferred to Ukraine.
Polish authorities also increasingly describe Russian pressure in terms of hybrid warfare rather than conventional military attack alone.
In October, the government accused Russian intelligence of directing an arson attack on infrastructure connected to Starlink satellite communications near Warsaw. Two Turkish nationals detained in Germany were suspected of involvement, while Polish officials said the incident was part of a wider Russian sabotage campaign targeting countries supporting Ukraine.
Moscow has repeatedly denied Western allegations that it organises sabotage and destabilisation operations across Europe.
For Poland, however, the possibility of Russian interference has become part of the background against which domestic events are interpreted. Cyberattacks, disinformation, sabotage, border pressure and conventional military threats are increasingly treated as parts of the same security environment.
Migration policy shows how much Tusk’s government has changed
The security atmosphere has also pushed Tusk toward policies that would once have seemed more closely associated with his conservative opponents.
Poland has kept a hard line on migration, particularly along routes connected to Belarus, which Warsaw accuses of using migrants as an instrument of political pressure against the European Union.
The government has also maintained temporary border controls with Germany and Lithuania and announced in October that they would remain in force until March 30, 2027.
Within the Schengen area, permanent internal border controls are supposed to be exceptional, but Poland argues that migration pressure and security concerns justify the measures.
This is one of the clearest examples of how Polish politics has changed since Tusk returned to power.
On courts, European integration and some social questions, his coalition represents a sharp break with Law and Justice. On border security, defence and Russia, the differences are much narrower.
Polish politics is deeply polarised, but the country’s strategic geography has produced areas of surprising continuity.
Poland’s economy is stronger than its political crisis suggests
The political picture can make Poland appear unstable, yet the economic picture is considerably more confident.
The European Commission expects the Polish economy to grow by about 3.5% in 2026 after expanding 3.6% in 2025. Unemployment is projected at around 3.1%, among the lowest rates in the European Union, while investment remains supported by European funds and large defence programmes.
There is another side to those numbers. Poland is running a substantial budget deficit, projected by the Commission at about 6.5% of GDP in 2026, while public debt is expected to continue rising as the government finances defence, infrastructure and social programmes.
Even so, the broader trajectory of the Polish economy has transformed the country’s international status.
Twenty years ago Poland was often discussed primarily as a large post-communist economy catching up with Western Europe. Today Washington is publicly supporting Poland’s bid to become a permanent member of the G20.
Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski attended the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in Atlanta this week, where U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Trump administration believes Poland’s economic success and growing global influence justify full membership.
Russia strongly objected.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov argued that inviting Poland broke with the G20’s consensus-based diplomatic practice and said Warsaw’s economy was not large enough to justify membership.
The disagreement reveals how dramatically Poland’s position has changed. It is no longer merely asking where it fits inside Europe; it is making a case for a larger role in global economic governance.
Poland is becoming more important just as its politics becomes harder to govern
That contrast runs through almost every major event in the country.
Poland is expanding its military while arguing over the legitimacy of its highest courts. It is pushing for greater international influence while its president and government struggle to agree on constitutional authority. It is one of Ukraine’s most important European supporters while tightening its own borders. Its economy continues to grow while the cost of defence and public spending pushes deficits higher.
The country’s influence is increasing faster than its political divisions are being resolved.
That makes the struggle between Tusk and Nawrocki more consequential than an ordinary partisan rivalry.
If Poland were politically peripheral to Europe, a prolonged institutional dispute could remain mostly domestic. Poland is not peripheral. It is central to NATO’s eastern flank, crucial to the movement of aid into Ukraine, one of the EU’s largest countries by population and an increasingly important economic power.
What happens inside Warsaw therefore affects decisions far beyond Poland.
Europe thought Tusk’s return would end the rule-of-law dispute
When Donald Tusk returned to government in December 2023, many officials in Brussels believed one of the European Union’s longest internal conflicts was moving toward resolution.
Relations with the European Commission improved quickly and access to previously blocked European funds was restored as Warsaw promised to repair judicial independence.
But political change proved easier than institutional reconstruction.
The problem is that restoring the rule of law is not the same thing as replacing one political camp’s judges with another camp’s judges.
If Tusk removes officials too aggressively, he risks confirming the opposition’s argument that judicial reform is simply another form of political control. If he proceeds too cautiously, structures created during the Law and Justice era remain in place and can continue blocking his programme.
There is no painless route through that contradiction.
The Constitutional Tribunal crisis has brought it into public view more clearly than ever.
The opposition is reopening Poland’s argument with Europe
At the same time, Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the opposition Law and Justice party, has revived another dispute that defined his party’s years in government: how much power Poland should surrender to the European Union.
Kaczyński recently suggested that nationalist governments could consider opening withdrawal negotiations as a pressure tactic to force major reforms inside the EU and return authority from Brussels to national governments.
He denied that he was advocating an immediate Polish departure from the bloc.
Tusk nevertheless seized on the remarks as evidence that the opposition was willing to place Poland’s European future at risk, while Foreign Minister Sikorski warned about the consequences of a future coalition between Law and Justice and harder-right parties.
An actual Polish exit from the EU remains a very different proposition from political rhetoric. Poland is deeply integrated into the single market, depends heavily on European trade and has received large amounts of EU investment and development funding.
Yet the debate matters because Poland is heading toward another parliamentary election in 2027, and coalition arithmetic could give smaller nationalist parties more influence over a future government.
The next election may therefore decide more than who becomes prime minister. It could determine whether Poland’s conflict with Brussels remains primarily about institutional powers or becomes a deeper argument about the country’s place inside the European project.
The most important question is no longer who wins an election
Poland still has functioning elections, competing political parties, a growing economy and institutions capable of resisting political pressure. The current crisis is not evidence that the state has ceased to function.
The concern lies elsewhere.
Democratic systems rely not only on elections but also on losing sides accepting the authority of institutions they do not control.
That acceptance is becoming increasingly fragile in Poland.
Tusk’s camp believes institutions reshaped by Law and Justice lost legitimacy because they were politically captured. Law and Justice and Nawrocki argue that Tusk’s government is now breaking constitutional rules in the name of repairing them.
The longer that cycle continues, the harder it becomes for either side to accept an unfavourable decision as legitimate.
That is why the image of President Nawrocki turning his aircraft around while police guarded the Constitutional Tribunal carries more weight than the personnel dispute that triggered it.
Outside Poland, the country is talking about G20 membership, building one of Europe’s strongest armies and positioning itself as a central power on NATO’s eastern frontier.
Inside Poland, its political leaders are still arguing over who has the right to decide which judges can sit in a courtroom.
The distance between those two realities may be the defining Polish story of 2026.
Sources
- Reuters — Polish president turns back from Senegal trip after top court chief suspended
- Associated Press — Police secure Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal as protests erupt over court chief’s suspension
- Associated Press — Women are protesting in Poland for free access to legal abortions
- Reuters — Polish lawmakers vote to ease abortion ban, but face likely presidential veto
- Reuters — Polish police detain man over threat to PM and defence minister
- Reuters — Poland’s ‘Bloody Friday’ school threats prompt huge police operation
- Associated Press — Poland blames Starlink sabotage on Russia
- Reuters — Poland to extend German, Lithuanian border controls until March 2027
- European Commission — Economic Forecast for Poland
- International Monetary Fund — Defense Spending: Macroeconomic Consequences and Trade-Offs — The Case of Poland
- Reuters — Poland’s Sikorski calls for rapid ceasefire in Black Sea to allow food shipments
- Reuters — Russia’s Lavrov says inviting Poland to attend G20 meeting breaks diplomatic rules
- Associated Press — Polish opposition leader floats EU exit talks to force reforms