Poland's Constitutional Tribunal Faces Rival Leadership Claims as Police Stand Guard

Poland's Constitutional Tribunal entered a new phase of its long-running leadership dispute over the weekend of November 1 when Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska announced the suspension of President Bogdan Swieczkowski and his deputy and declared herself acting head of the court.

The existing leadership rejected the announcement. Police were deployed around the tribunal building in Warsaw as several hundred protesters gathered. President Karol Nawrocki, an ally of the previous Law and Justice government, cut short a foreign trip and issued a statement accusing Prime Minister Donald Tusk of staging a forced takeover of a constitutional body.

Tusk responded in a televised address that the tribunal, as shaped by the prior government, had not functioned as a real court and that legislative attempts to resolve the impasse had been blocked. Justice Minister Waldemar Zurek sought to strip Swieczkowski and the deputy of judicial immunity, which could open the path to criminal proceedings over alleged obstruction of the tribunal's work.

The conflict dates to the eight years of Law and Justice rule, when the party filled the tribunal with its appointees. After Tusk's coalition took office in 2023 it pledged to restore judicial independence, but Nawrocki has refused to swear in several judges elected by the current parliamentary majority. Those judges took oaths in parliament instead, yet Swieczkowski barred them from hearing cases.

Korwin-Piotrowska has called a general assembly of tribunal judges for November 3 to approve the court's proposed 2027 budget. The dual claims to authority leave the institution without a single recognized leadership. Riot police have remained near the premises since Friday.

The European Commission has previously withheld funds over rule-of-law concerns linked to the tribunal. Domestic observers note that the latest confrontation brings the institutional standoff into the open rather than resolving the underlying question of which set of appointments is valid. The next formal step is the November 3 assembly, which the suspended leadership has already indicated it does not recognize.

For Polish politics the episode continues a pattern in which control of the highest court remains contested between the government, the president, and rival groups of judges. No independent verification of the legal basis for the suspension has been issued by a third party as of November 2.