Poland's constitutional crisis crossed into physical confrontation Friday night when government-appointed judges voted to suspend the court's president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and his deputy, Bartłomiej Sochański, then declared one of their own — Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, one of five judges President Nawrocki refused to swear in — as acting chief. The legal basis for the suspension is, by the assessment of even sympathetic legal scholars, thin to nonexistent. Prominent law professor Marcin Matczak, an outspoken critic of PiS, said he never expected to find himself defending Święczkowski but believed the suspension had no legal foundation. The reaction was immediate and kinetic. President Karol Nawrocki — a PiS-backed conservative and Trump ally who won last year's presidential election — turned his plane around mid-flight to Senegal, arrived at the court, and physically pushed past police and security to enter the building. Video shows the president tussling with officers to force his way through. He remained inside as of 4am, issuing a statement accusing the government of seizing a constitutional body by force and demanding security forces withdraw. Hundreds of protesters, including opposition MPs, gathered outside the tribunal. Police detained three people after some breached the building's perimeter fence. The scene — riot police, a president barging through a cordon, competing claims of coup — is the culmination of a structural rot that began in 2015, when both outgoing centrists and incoming PiS each made legally questionable moves to stack the bench with their judges. PiS then spent eight years weaponizing the court during its period of illiberal governance, drawing sustained conflict with the EU over rule-of-law standards. Donald Tusk's government, which returned to power in 2023, has framed the intervention as restoring constitutional order after years of PiS's capture of judicial institutions. Tusk stated bluntly: "Restoring the rule of law is our duty. After years of PiS's lawlessness, this is a difficult process, sometimes painful, and it requires decisive action." Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, speaking at a G20 meeting in Atlanta, argued the tribunal was politicised under the previous government and that the move allows duly elected judges to restore function. The problem is that the method used to restore legitimacy may have destroyed it. Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek has asked for Święczkowski and Sochański to be stripped of legal immunity to face prosecution, while the Venice Commission said last month that Nawrocki's refusal to swear in judges should not prevent them from assuming their posts. But legal experts are deeply split on whether Friday's suspension has any constitutional standing. The government is deploying extralegal force to fix what it argues was an extralegal capture — a recursive trap with no clean exit. The international response has split along predictable lines. European far-right figures — Nigel Farage, Liz Truss, Geert Wilders — condemned the move. US Ambassador Tom Rose struck a cautious tone, noting both sides offer sharply different accounts and warning the gathering crowds make an already dangerous situation "more combustible." The court's own social media account accused the government of a judicial coup d'état. This is not a story about who is right. It is a story about what happens when institutional legitimacy is destroyed over a decade and both sides claim the authority to rebuild it by force. The next parliamentary election looms, polls show the populist right competitive, and the precedent being set — that a governing majority can physically seize a paralysed court — will be available to whoever wins next.
