Polish police deployed to the Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw on Friday after the court's head judge, Bogdan Swieczkowski, was suspended — triggering protests from supporters of the former Law and Justice (PiS) government that appointed him. Three people were detained after projectiles were thrown at officers. The suspension is not a bolt from the blue. It is the predictable escalation of a standoff that has paralysed Poland's top court for over a year. Swieczkowski, a PiS appointee, spent six months using his position to block judges elected by the current parliamentary majority from taking their seats. Justice Minister Waldemar Zurek responded by requesting that Swieczkowski's and his deputy's parliamentary immunity be lifted for obstructing judicial function. The suspended judge has been replaced by Anna Korwin-Piotrowska — one of the very judges PiS-allied President Karol Nawrocki has refused to swear in, citing alleged procedural flaws in her selection. This is the structural knot at the centre of the crisis. Prime Minister Donald Tusk's Civic Coalition government holds a parliamentary majority and has twice passed legislation to restore judicial independence. Both attempts were vetoed — first by PiS's previous presidential ally, and now by Nawrocki, who was elected in mid-2025. The president controls the swearing-in of judges; Nawrocki has refused three of six parliament-nominated appointees. The result is a court that cannot function: blocked judges cannot sit, incumbent PiS-aligned judges are being removed, and neither side can achieve a decisive majority on the bench. The extraction runs in both directions but asymmetrically. PiS, during its 2015-2023 tenure, captured the tribunal by packing it with ideologically sympathetic judges — a manoeuvre that drew sustained criticism from the European Union and domestic rule-of-law advocates. The current government's countermove — suspending the head judge, seeking immunity lifts — is legally aggressive but aimed at restoring institutional independence rather than installing its own loyalists. The difference matters, though the optics of police at court gates inevitably blur the distinction. Nawrocki's decision to turn his plane around mid-flight from Senegal was pure political theatre, but effective theatre. By framing the suspension as a constitutional crisis requiring presidential presence, he positioned himself as the defender of institutional order against government overreach — a mirror image of Tusk's own framing. Former Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro called it "a blatant, criminal attack on the constitutional order," language designed to delegitimise the government's actions entirely. The European Union dimension looms over everything. Brussels spent years pressuring PiS over judicial independence, withholding recovery funds and initiating rule-of-law proceedings. Tusk's government was supposed to resolve this. Instead, the constitutional deadlock has deepened, and the EU has limited tools to intervene in what is now a domestic enforcement fight between co-equal branches of government. If this pattern continues, Poland faces a constitutional tribunal that exists in name but cannot adjudicate — a hollow institution that both sides claim to defend while rendering it inoperable. The 20-year trajectory is a judiciary whose legitimacy depends entirely on which party last held power, with no stable institutional consensus on who counts as a lawful judge. That is not rule of law. It is rule of sequence.
