POLAND IN CRISIS: POLICE STORM CONSTITUTIONAL COURT GROUNDS AS CONSERVATIVE CHIEF SUSPENDED; TRUMP-ALLIED PRESIDENT TURNS PLANE AROUND MID-FLIGHT
Police rushed the grounds of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal on Friday amid protests and objects thrown at officers. Within hours, the court’s conservative president, Bogdan Święczkowski, was declared suspended, along with his deputy. The Tribunal itself labeled the move a coup d’état.
President Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist aligned with the former Law and Justice government and a close partner of Donald Trump, was already airborne to Senegal when the news hit. He immediately ordered the plane turned around. “At a moment like this, the President must be in Poland. I am returning,” he posted.
This is the latest flashpoint in a years-long war over Poland’s highest court. Nawrocki has refused to swear in judges nominated by the current parliamentary majority.
Święczkowski has blocked others from taking their seats. The result has been paralysis. Donald Tusk’s government, which has spent years trying to purge the bench of PiS-era appointees under the banner of “restoring the rule of law,” finally moved while the president was out of the country.
Pro-government judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska announced the one-month suspension. Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek is already pushing to lift the judges’ immunity. Opposition voices, including former officials and PiS supporters gathered outside the building, call it pure political violence aimed at neutralizing the last independent check on the government.
Police say they entered the premises after security warnings and incidents at the protest; they insist they did not enter the building itself. The court’s official channels have been disrupted.
Nawrocki is racing home to confront it. Conservatives see a calculated power play against the last institutional stronghold of the nationalist right. The president’s mid-flight reversal signals he intends to treat it as exactly that.