Friday’s late-night confrontation at Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, which drew riot police and protesters and prompted President Karol Nawrocki to turn his plane around and return to Warsaw, has reignited a bitter debate over whether Prime Minister Donald Tusk is restoring the rule of law or overstepping constitutional limits.
The dispute erupted after the tribunal announced the suspension of its president, Bogdan Święczkowski, a move that supporters of Tusk’s government described as necessary to restore judicial independence, while critics denounced it as an unconstitutional power grab.
Marcin Przydacz, the head of the International Policy Bureau in Nawrocki’s office, took to European TV Monday morning denouncing Tusk’s actions, saying, “Even lawyers who are close to the Tusk government say that there’s absolutely no legal basis for such behavior.”
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The dispute is also triggering diplomatic fallout, with at least three Polish ambassadors resigning in protest. Przydacz, a former parliament member of the now-opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, says Poland’s permanent representative to the U.N. since 2021, Krzysztof Szczerski, resigned Monday, which followed the resignations over the weekend of the ambassadors to China and Romania.
“This crisis didn’t begin on Friday,” said Simone Rodan‑Benzaquen, senior envoy to Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Poland has been living with a deeply compromised Constitutional Tribunal for more than a decade.”
Rodan-Benzaquen said the confrontation cannot be understood in isolation. Parliament has continued appointing judges under Poland’s constitution, but several of those appointments have been blocked from taking office amid a years-long standoff between the government, the presidency and the tribunal itself.
“This isn’t simply a case of Tusk deciding to pack a functioning, independent court ahead of an election,” Rodan-Benzaquen tells Fox News Digital. “There is a genuine institutional crisis that predates his government, and a legitimate question of how to resolve it.”
That underlying conflict exploded into public view Friday after Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska suspended Święczkowski and his deputy, triggering protests outside the tribunal and prompting Nawrocki to abandon a trip to Senegal. Police detained three people after some demonstrators clashed with officers outside the court complex.
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Rodan-Benzaquen cautioned that concerns about Friday’s actions are not limited to supporters of the opposition, saying they “raise serious questions about the legality and proportionality of the methods being used.”
Critics of the government have described Friday’s events as an unprecedented assault on Poland’s constitutional order. “My former boss, Margaret Thatcher, would have been absolutely appalled by what we’re witnessing in Poland,” Nile Gardner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation told Fox News Digital. “This is clearly a crisis for Poland and an attempted coup by Donald Tusk.”
“This has all the hallmarks of a Soviet-style coup operation,” added Gardner, who said Tusk waited until Nawrocki was traveling out of the country, accusing the prime minister of undermining the tribunal and further destabilizing Poland ahead of next year’s election. “It’s the sort of thing you’d expect actually from a third world dictator.”
Others reject the coup characterization. Boštjan Udovič, chair of international relations at the University of Ljubljana, says the dispute centers on the government’s attempt to restore judicial arrangements that critics of the previous PiS government say were inconsistent with both Poland’s constitution and European legal standards.
“Tusk wants to restore the situation as required by the constitution and the international institutions,” Udovič said. “I think that he hoped the transition would be easier.”
Tusk defended his government’s actions as part of an effort to restore the rule of law, accusing both the president and the tribunal of improperly blocking judges elected by parliament from taking office. “The solution to the conflict is simple,” he said on Monday. “The president recognizes the judges legally elected by [parliament], because that is what the Constitution stipulates.” He accused Nawrocki of “choosing forceful confrontation, which could cost Poland very dearly. A democratic state under the rule of law cannot yield to violence.”
“Restoring the rule of law is essential,” Rodan-Benzaquen says, warning against viewing the dispute purely through a partisan lens. “But the legitimacy of that restoration depends not only on its objectives, but also on the legality of the means used to achieve it.”
The divide in Poland has increasingly been reflected abroad, with European institutions and political leaders offering sharply different interpretations of the crisis.
The European Commission has largely backed the Polish parliament’s authority to appoint judges. European Commissioner Michael McGrath said selecting new judges lies within the powers of Poland’s parliament.
French opposition leader Marine Le Pen, meanwhile, accused Brussels of applying a double standard. “One cannot claim to defend democracy and the rule of law while remaining silent when the constitutional balance of a member state is gravely threatened,” she posted on X. “The proliferation of such strong-arm tactics within the European Union itself is beginning to raise serious questions.”
“America is on Poland’s side,” U.S. Ambassador to Poland Tom Rose posted to X, urging restraint. “Our concern is for the stability, security, and democratic future of a country we are proud to call our friend and ally… Poland has come too far and accomplished too much to let political differences, no matter how strongly felt, put any of that at risk.”
For Rodan-Benzaquen, the larger issue extends far beyond the events of Friday night. “One side claims to be defending constitutional order against the abuses of the other, while the institutions that should arbitrate the dispute have themselves become the object of the dispute,” she said.
With parliamentary elections in Poland only a year away, the battle over who gets to define the rule of law may prove more consequential than the confrontation that unfolded this weekend.
Calling Tusk’s tactics “straight out of the Putin playbook,” Gardner warns Poland is in “an incredibly dangerous situation right now, and the blame is squarely at the door of Donald Tusk and his government.”
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.