Poland, institutional clash: Nawrocki challenges police outside the Constitutional Tribunal

During the night between October 30 and 31, Polish President Karol Nawrocki interrupted a trip to Senegal to return home and go directly to the headquarters of the Constitutional Tribunal, guarded by police. The move came after the announcement, on October 30, of the one-month suspension of the Tribunal’s president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and vice-president, Bartłomiej Sochański, decided by the government led by Donald Tusk.

The episode turned an institutional dispute into a direct confrontation between the top figures of the State. Nawrocki showed up in front of the building guarded by officers, while the Tusk government defended the measure as necessary. The prime minister rejected any accusation of institutional overreach in blunt terms: “No compromise with illegality,” Tusk said.

At the European level, the Commission took a position on the legal issue at the center of the clash: according to Brussels, the appointment of new judges to the Tribunal falls under the constitutional competence of the Sejm, the Polish Parliament. The statement comes as the crisis surrounding the Court has now been open for days, pitting against each other the two main centers of power in the Polish State, the government and the presidency.

Tension also spilled into the streets. During the first night of protests around the Tribunal’s headquarters, police detained three demonstrators. The limited number of arrests contrasts with the symbolic scale of the episode: a President of the Republic personally going, at night, to confront a deployment of law enforcement in front of a judicial institution.

The clash also drew reactions from outside Poland’s borders. Russian political figure Dmitry Medvedev commented on the episode, calling it an ongoing “coup d’état,” a reading that should be placed in the context of an external political comment and not in that of a legal assessment by the Polish or European institutions involved.

“No compromise with illegality” — Donald Tusk, Polish prime minister

The core of the dispute remains the suspension of the Tribunal’s two top officials, a measure the government considers legitimate and which the presidency contests in practice, physically guarding the institution’s headquarters. The European Commission’s position, identifying the Sejm as the constitutional venue for the appointment of judges, shifts the matter to the parliamentary level, where the next phase of the affair will now play out.

It remains to be seen how long police will continue to guard the Tribunal’s building and what the Tusk government’s next steps will be regarding the suspension of the two judges, at the center of a clash that in just a few hours has involved the prime minister, the president and the European Commission.