More than a decade of conflict has deprived Poland of an accepted constitutional arbiter. Victory in the latest confrontation, whoever wins it, will not restore one.
On October 30, Poland’s president aborted a flight to Senegal mid-route as police blockaded the Constitutional Tribunal and rival judges fought for control. By November 4, the standoff had unraveled into competing criminal allegations. Beneath the spectacle lies a fundamental crisis of authority: state institutions no longer agree on whose decisions constitute law.
The tribunal decides whether legislation contravenes the constitution and settles disputes over constitutional powers. Its 15 judges serve non-renewable nine-year terms. Parliament’s lower house, the Sejm, elects them. The president administers their statutory oaths. That distinction matters: the constitution gives him no power to block parliament’s choice.
The first overreach came from the outgoing Civic Platform-led majority in October 2015. It elected five judges, including two for vacancies belonging to the next parliament. The tribunal upheld the legal basis for three of the appointments, rejecting the other two. President Andrzej Duda, broadly seen as supportive of the then- and soon-to-win right-wing opposition, refused all five oaths. The incoming Law and Justice majority elected five replacements, of which three occupied already-filled seats. Duda swore them in.
In 2016, Law and Justice rewrote procedural rules while the government withheld adverse judgments from official publication. The new tribunal president’s appointment, made without the required judicial resolution and with unlawfully (see above) elected judges’ participation, consolidated political control. Legislation adopted in 2017 let parliament choose the National Council of the Judiciary’s 15 judicial members, previously selected by judges. Since that council recommends judicial appointments, the consequences spread beyond the tribunal. Supreme Court disciplinary arrangements prompted further European Court of Human Rights findings of systemic violations.
The consequences reached citizens. The tribunal’s 2020 abortion ruling sharply restricted access to the procedure. In 2021, it challenged EU-law requirements concerning judicial independence. By December 2025, the EU Court of Justice found that the tribunal itself failed to meet requirements of independence and lawful establishment. Thus, these conclusions cannot be reduced to partisan accusations. It is fair to say that both sides of Poland’s chasmic political divide have broken the rules.
Donald Tusk has since returned from Brussels, where he led the European Council, and his new coalition took office in December 2023, promising to restore judicial independence. But parliamentary electoral victory did not terminate judicial terms or presidential powers. Its 2024 legislation, which sought to require broader parliamentary support for appointments and prevent presidential obstruction of judges’ oaths, and referred by Duda for constitutional review, was blocked by the tribunal in July 2025. The new president, Karol Nawrocki, vetoed judicial-council reform in February. The coalition lacked override and constitutional-amendment majorities. The EU’s closure of Article 7 proceedings (for breaches of the EU’s founding values) in 2024 did not resolve that impasse.
Restoration also introduced contested methods. Tusk’s new government stopped publishing tribunal judgments altogether. The Venice Commission opposed this, even where unlawfully appointed judges participated. Disputes over prosecution leadership extended the pattern. In 2024, the prosecution service rejected a Supreme Court resolution affirming the national prosecutor’s appointment, arguing that the judges who issued it had themselves been improperly appointed. Even more confusingly, the Supreme Court chamber that validated Nawrocki’s election in 2025 was itself contested: the government published its resolution with a notice challenging its composition.
In 2026, parliament elected eight tribunal judges, enough for a majority. Nawrocki administered three oaths, while five appointees relied on ceremonies in parliament without him. Tribunal president Bogdan Święczkowski, a former prosecutor and PiS appointee, refused to assign work to those five.
The argument dragged on until October 30, when one of the tribunal’s justices, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, ordered a month-long interruption of Święczkowski’s and his deputy’s duties, and sought to take the top job herself. That led to Nawrocki’s mid-air turnaround and a hasty return to Warsaw, where he alleged a forcible takeover. Tusk defended restoration, and police cited public safety.
The embattled tribunal has become a participant in the struggle it should have contained. Its loss of authority undermines the constitutional settlement on which public institutions depend. Citizens must navigate uncertainty over decisions affecting their rights, while every attempt at repair risks becoming a precedent for the next takeover.
A credible recovery therefore requires a negotiated constitutional refoundation, and not a mere change of personnel.
Some have suggested a reset with new rules for appointments. That would require cross-party constitutional agreement and safeguards against repeating the purge after every election. One proposal distributes appointments among parliament’s two chambers and the president, with a cooling-off period for politicians. Any design would have to prevent the establishment of a new monopoly, while preserving legal certainty for citizens affected by past judgments.
Both camps can mobilize supporters to “defend” the constitution against the other. An independent arbiter would require both to accept some unwelcome changes. For a country whose extraordinary economic ascent has secured a place at G20 meetings, this is a self-inflicted loss of credibility.
Poland’s international standing has outpaced its institutional settlement. It remains trapped in a dispute whose origins are nearly forgotten but whose electoral rewards endure: each camp mobilizes supporters against an allegedly lawless opponent and portrays constraints on its own power as partisan obstruction. Any compromise would weaken that appeal. A compromise would blunt that political advantage.
Maciej Bukowski is the Head of the Energy and Resilience Program at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation in Warsaw and is a non-resident fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), where he writes about issues including Central European security.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
