A sharp conflict has erupted in Poland over the Constitutional Tribunal, which has become a striking example of the rule of law crisis in the European Union. The events unfolding in Warsaw are reminiscent of precedents of “judicial coups” in other EU countries.
Last June I called Poland’s predicament a perfect Catch-22: a pro-EU prime minister with a programme, and a sovereigntist president with a veto pen. I expected a long, grinding stalemate until the 2027 elections. I did not expect riot shields.
Friday Night in Warsaw
On the evening of Friday, 30 October 2026, Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska announced that the Constitutional Tribunal’s president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and his deputy, Bartłomiej Sochański, were suspended for a month. She would run the court herself, on the grounds that her overall years of judicial service made her the senior judge. The cited basis was a provision of the law on common courts, which lets a court president or the justice minister sideline a judge caught committing an offence. Constitutional scholar Marcin Matczak pointed out the obvious: the justice minister has no oversight over this Tribunal, so the provision does not fit.
Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek, who is also prosecutor general, then moved to strip both men of immunity. The motions were reportedly delivered to Korwin-Piotrowska herself. So, the judge who suspends is also the judge who receives the request to prosecute. A tidy circle, isn’t it?
Riot police ringed the building. Seven of the eight judges the Sejm has elected this year were escorted in by State Protection Service officers, through a gate connected to the prime minister’s chancellery. Sochański was kept out. President Karol Nawrocki, who was flying to Senegal, turned his plane around, reached the court during the night and was involved in scuffles at the entrance. He called it a forcible takeover of a constitutional organ. Jarosław Kaczyński announced a police state. Donald Tusk answered that restoring the rule of law is a duty, that it is painful, and that there is no other way.
Those eight judges are the root of the quarrel. Nawrocki swore in three and refused five, citing flaws in their selection. The five swore themselves in inside parliament, and Święczkowski refused to seat them. Supporters of the president call his refusals a constitutional prerogative, and critics call them obstruction. Either way, it is a dispute for a court to settle, and the court is the very thing in question. That is the Catch-22 I described, now with a police cordon.
In 2015 the outgoing majority elected five judges on the eve of defeat, and PiS refused to seat three of them, replacing them with its own picks. Brussels was right to object to that. Whether the cure may include a police operation timed for the president’s flight is a question on which even scholars sympathetic to the goal, such as Matczak, have warned that the method could become a template for the next government.
Everyone Has a Precedent
Analysts like to present this as a regional “rule of law recession”, a slump in judicial independence spreading from Budapest to Bratislava to Warsaw. They are right about the pattern, though not in the direction they usually intend because the label is wielded by whichever camp happens to be out of power, which does not negate the label, it paints the situation with a clumpier brush.
Hungary was the early blueprint, and Slovakia under Fico later took the shorter route of dissolving its Special Prosecutor’s Office in 2024.
In 2011, the Orbán government lowered the judges’ retirement age from 70 to 62, effective on 1 January 2012, and hundreds of senior judges were gone within months. The Court of Justice of the EU ruled in November 2012 that this was age discrimination, but by then the seats were filled and the judges were not coming back.
Then came the poly twist. In April 2026 Péter Magyar’s Tisza won 138 of 199 seats, and Orbán conceded. Magyar then demanded the resignation of Fidesz-linked Constitutional Court judges, the Supreme Court head and the prosecutor general, and threatened removal proceedings if they refused. Tusk’s dilemma, in other words, has already crossed the Danube. How do you remove a captured judiciary without behaving like the one that captured it?
Then there is Romania, the precedent that matters most because it came from the other side. Călin Georgescu topped the first round on 24 November 2024. On 6 December, two days before the runoff, the Constitutional Court annulled the vote, relying on intelligence briefings declassified on 4 December. They described a coordinated TikTok campaign and a swarm of influencer accounts. They did not name who paid, and critics noted that tactics resembling ordinary digital campaigning were presented as the work of a hostile state. Georgescu was then barred from the rerun, which Nicușor Dan won in May 2025 against George Simion. As I noted in my earlier piece, Simion had appeared on stage with Nawrocki weeks before, the so-called Warsaw-Bucharest Axis. Hold that thought.
This is exactly why PiS went after the judges in the first place. In any quarrel with Brussels, the national judiciary is the lever because the Court of Justice insists that EU law outranks national law. Poland’s own Tribunal answered that insolence in 2021 by declaring parts of the Treaties incompatible with the Polish constitution. PiS dressed its purge in a different costume: it was merely sweeping out communist remnants. It is unconvincing, and the arithmetic backs that verdict.
By 2015 the Berlin Wall had been down for a quarter of a century, and any judge who had sat under the old regime was drifting towards retirement anyway. Nobody wages a bruising war for control of the courts to evict pensioners. The sovereigntist logic is the more honest explanation, which makes the communist story the weakest alibi in the file. Capture, in other words, runs in both directions. Nationalists capture courts to resist Brussels, and centrists capture the narrative around courts to resist nationalists. Everybody claims the rule of law, and everybody keeps a spare set of judges.
The Brussels Effect, Applied Domestically
Academics coined “the Brussels effect” to describe Europe exporting its regulations to the world. Poland is now the case study for the home edition, in which Brussels’ preferences arrive through the judiciary, the currency and the funding.
Consider the sequence. On 18 December 2025 the Court of Justice ruled that the Polish Tribunal, because of politicised appointments, does not qualify as an independent tribunal and has disregarded the primacy of EU law. Żurek welcomed the ruling, saying it obliges the state to act. Barely ten months later, the state acted. Add the daily penalties I mentioned earlier, which have already accumulated to hundreds of millions of euros, and the years in which Poland’s EU funds were frozen over these same reforms, and the lever becomes visible. Money, rulings and deadlines, applied until a government rearranges its own institutions.
It is tempting to go further and assume that Tusk, a former president of the European Council, would not have moved without calls from Brussels. I can see no public evidence of such calls, and it should be said so. But then nobody needs a phone call when the script has been published in the Official Journal.
Brussels, for its part, has reportedly reminded everyone that the Sejm has the right to appoint judges, which tidily sidesteps the question of who swears them in. The European Commission publicly announced its backing of Donald Tusk’s move, via written statements dispersed directly across European and international news agencies and media outlets.
The timing matters. The elections are due in autumn 2027, and a Tribunal firmly under friendly management could, the worry goes, reproduce the Romanian outcome if the “wrong” candidate or party surged ahead. I treat that as a warning and not as a fact. But look at the wider picture. Consider Bulgaria, which adopted the euro on 1 January 2026. President Rumen Radev asked for a referendum, parliament declined, and polls showed the country almost exactly split, roughly 47 to 47. Poland keeps the złoty, and the president is hostile to joining.
A Tribunal, a central bank, a currency: you can see why institutional alignment is the first item on the agenda. The more lurid reading that Brussels wants Poland “online” before its “2030” confrontation with Russia, at least rhymes with a continent busy rearming under a plan literally named Readiness 2030.
The explanation of why the confrontation never cools that I find most provocative splits the establishment into roughly a more highly likely grift, and a possibility of genuine hawkish voices, who sincerely believe Russia is a house of cards. The logic runs like this: once careers, contracts and reputations are tied to the Ukraine project, peace becomes the threat, because it exposes the bill. War, or at least its permanent threat, prolongs the grift, so the grift has to become war, and most will cheer the hawks along. That remains a thesis and not a proven fact, and I would not state it as one. But anybody watching a continent answer a gas storage shortfall with yet another sanctions package can at least see why it appeals to the sceptics.
Meanwhile, the Western press reads this as a story about nasty nationalists. Yet Nawrocki is no easy fit for the Kremlin-stooge costume. I noted before that he is wanted on Russia’s own list for removing Soviet-era monuments. He supports military aid to Ukraine and keeps open every one of the nine border crossings through which it flows. What he opposes is Ukraine joining the EU or NATO and ceding more control to Brussels.
Send in the Bots
Which is why the next step was predictable. On 31 October, hours after the clashes, Tusk released a video claiming that his opponents enjoyed the support of “an army of Russian bots” and had received public compliments from the Kremlin’s “chief ideologue”. The report I read gave no data, no accounts and no examples.
Moscow’s reply was sarcasm. On 1 November, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, posted on X, “I love this mantra!”, then ran down a mock-solemn list in which a US election, migration in Spain and Poland’s constitutional crisis were all blamed on the Russians, and signed off with the warning that Russia is coming. Tusk’s remark about “compliments from the Kremlin’s chief ideologue” named nobody. Yet, the irony writes itself: when the alleged culprit is laughing at the accusation, in public, the accuser has handed him a free punchline.
It is a familiar move. In 2016, the claim was that Russia put Trump in the White House. The Mueller report did not establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Moscow, and the later Durham review was harsh on the FBI’s handling of the affair. In October 2020, fifty-one former intelligence officials signed a letter saying the Hunter Biden laptop story had the “classic earmarks” of a Russian information operation, before any forensic work was done on it. In Romania, the allegation ended a presidential election. Even Ukraine’s military intelligence warned in May 2025 of a Russian “doppelgänger” campaign aimed at Poland’s presidential vote. Nawrocki won anyway, and the warning has aged like fish.
In January 2025 Thierry Breton was widely quoted on French television saying that what was done in Romania could be done in Germany if needed, and a month later JD Vance used his Munich speech to ask Europe awkward questions about Romania. Breton later insisted the EU never annulled any election, a technical truth because Romania’s court did it. Still, the Parliament in Strasbourg found the remarks significant enough to receive formal questions about them.
Warsaw has itself complained about Russians recruiting locals online for sabotage. The question is the standard of proof. A claim that can end an election, or justify a police cordon around a court, belongs in front of a judge with evidence, and not in a video clip posted at midnight. And there is the delicious ironic circularity: the judges who would test such evidence are exactly the ones currently being rearranged.
A Question Without a Comfortable Answer
The pro-Brussels camp tells us that the Tribunal had to be rescued from PiS. The sovereigntist camp tells us it was stormed by a government doing Brussels’ bidding. Both have documents and both have a point. What neither can explain is why a rule-of-law restoration needs riot police, a suspended chief justice, and a prime minister’s gate.
Poland’s Catch-22 has not been solved. It has simply been upgraded: the veto pen met a police baton, and the EU institutions applauded the one that carried the rulings. As Molly O’Neal of Responsible Statecraft once warned, the sovereigntist-versus-mainstream contest could force a fundamental redesign of the Union. If the redesign is conducted by police cordon and “Russian bot” press releases, I wonder who will be left to call it democratic.
Only the future can answer.
Tamer Mansour, Egyptian Independent Writer & Researcher
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