Poland: Protesters Clash With Police as Constitutional Court Chief Is Suspended Amid Rule-of-Law Dispute

On Friday night, protesters gathered outside Poland's Constitutional Court in Warsaw, and police were sent to secure the grounds. The trigger was a statement on the court's own website: its president, Bogdan Swieczkowski, and his deputy had been suspended for one month. Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska was named to lead the institution in the meantime.

Warsaw police said they went to the court after one judge alerted them to possible threats to the safety of judges and staff. Dozens of riot police were deployed as supporters of the Law and Justice party, known as PiS, protested through the evening against Swieczkowski's removal. The court's official X account described what had happened as a "coup d'etat," and some in the crowd chanted "Tusk traitor." The headline of the DW report speaks of clashes with police, though the account itself gives few details of what took place.

Swieczkowski is one of a number of judges aligned with PiS who were appointed while the party governed Poland, from 2015 to 2023. When Prime Minister Donald Tusk's center-left alliance took power after the 2023 parliamentary election, it announced that it would reverse the judicial reforms PiS had pushed through, which had been controversial.

Tusk backed the suspension in a post on X. "Restoring the rule of law is our duty," he wrote. He called the process after years of PiS-led lawlessness "difficult" and "sometimes painful," said it required decisive action, and added: "There is no other way."

President Karol Nawrocki, a right-wing politician, responded by canceling a planned trip to Senegal. "At a moment like this, the president must be in Poland," he said. After returning, he made his way through the police barricade and into the court. His chief of staff, Pawel Szefernaker, wrote on X early Saturday that Nawrocki entered the Constitutional Tribunal building accompanied by Zbigniew Kapinski, the First President of the Supreme Court.

The standoff has a history. In recent months Nawrocki had refused to swear in five top court judges nominated by parliament. Those judges took their oath before parliament instead, and Swieczkowski then denied them access to the court building.

What to watch now is whether Nawrocki's entry into the court, and the unresolved question of the five judges who were never sworn in by the president, deepen the conflict between the government and the presidency over who controls the country's top court.