Fight Over Poland's Top Court Pits President Against Prime Minister

The battle over who controls Poland's top constitutional court has intensified in Warsaw, fought in front of the cream-coloured palace in the city centre that houses the Constitutional Tribunal, surrounded by police and protesters.

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) 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 the rule of law and conform with EU norms on impartiality. Nawrocki's supporters accuse Tusk of backing a coup.

The clash is set to come 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, which ruled from 2015 to 2023.

The crowd outside the tribunal protesting against Tusk's government included PiS co-founder Jarosław Kaczyński, extreme-right Polexit campaigner Grzegorz Braun, former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and libertarian Sławomir Mentzen. Anna Bryłka, vice president of Mentzen's Confederation party, said there are plenty of differences between their programmes, but ending Prime Minister Tusk's government is the fundamental common goal.

The fight over control of the tribunal is helping to bring right-wing opposition parties together ahead of next year's parliamentary election. Tusk's Civic Coalition leads the 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.

Borys Budka, a Civic Coalition member of the European Parliament and a former justice minister, said the elections will be crucial for Polish democracy. If a right-wing coalition came to power, he said, they would eliminate independent institutions that could hold them to account and take Poland out of the European Union, something they have openly discussed. Kaczyński last week raised the possibility of a Polexit.

The roots of the dispute go back to October 2015, when 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. After PiS won the election, the new majority declared all five selections void, elected five replacements and had them sworn in by President Andrzej Duda. 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 by 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 parliament he would swear in — which critics say is a 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 to return to Warsaw, arriving 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 made unlawful physical contact with the president.

Święczkowski 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. On Monday Tusk wrote that resolving the conflict is simple and possible without constitutional changes, saying Nawrocki should recognise judges lawfully elected by parliament, as required by the constitution, and allow them to take up their duties. He also accused Nawrocki of choosing a confrontation that could cost Poland dearly, and added that the democratic state would not yield to violence.