In brief: Friday’s standoff over Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, sparked by President Karol Nawrocki’s refusal to swear in five judges, has roots in a decades-old rift within Solidarity. That divide hardened into the rivalry between Civic Platform and Law and Justice and, after 2015, a fight for control of the country’s top court.
The world has grown accustomed to hearing good things about Poland. Its booming economy, transformed cities and growing influence in European affairs have made it one of the continent’s great success stories.
So the scenes from Warsaw on Friday night must have come as something of a shock.
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Police outside the building, rival judges claiming to be in charge, right-wing politicians denouncing a coup and President Karol Nawrocki turning his plane around on the way to Senegal to hurry back to Warsaw. It was hardly the image of a confident, mature democracy.
For a country that has been a democracy for almost four decades, it was a bewildering sight.
The immediate cause was not hard to identify. Nawrocki refused to receive the oaths of five Constitutional Tribunal judges elected by parliament. When they tried to take up their positions, the Tribunal’s existing leadership refused to recognize them.
Friday’s dramatic intervention, in which one of the judges Nawrocki had refused to swear in moved to suspend the Tribunal’s president and his deputy and take over its leadership, was backed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government but fiercely contested on legal grounds by its opponents.
But the row over five judges only tells us so much about how Poland ended up here. To understand the deeper causes, we need to go back almost four decades, to the negotiated compromise that ended communism in 1989 and an argument among the victorious Solidarity movement about what kind of state should emerge.
That argument simmered through the economic upheavals of the 1990s, took on a recognisable political shape in 2005, when Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO) and Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice (PiS) emerged as the country’s two main political rivals, and grew increasingly poisonous after the Smolensk air disaster five years later.
PiS’s capture of the Constitutional Tribunal after 2015 then brought the conflict into the heart of Poland’s constitutional system.
An argument among the victors
Poland’s partial transition from communism in 1989 was achieved through negotiation and compromise. The Round Table talks between the communist authorities and the Solidarity opposition opened the way to democracy, sparing the country a potentially bloody confrontation.
The settlement left much of the old communist establishment intact. Its architects saw a historic compromise on which to build a modern Poland. Others within Solidarity increasingly saw it as a betrayal, believing that the new republic had been compromised from birth by allowing former communist elites to retain too much power.
And this is the important point for understanding modern Poland. Both traditions emerged from Solidarity. Both could claim a share of its moral authority. Yet they disagreed over what their common victory meant, and who had remained faithful to its ideals.
In August 1989, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Poland’s first non-communist prime minister, declared that his government would draw a “thick line” under the past.
He meant that it would answer for its own decisions rather than the failures of its communist predecessors. His critics seized on the phrase as evidence that the old establishment would be allowed to escape accountability.
Then came the economic shock therapy. The radical market reforms laid the foundations for Poland’s subsequent prosperity, but they also brought factory closures, unemployment and widening inequalities.
By 2002, unemployment had reached around 20%. The transformation created winners and a lot of losers, giving Kaczyński a receptive audience for his argument that the new republic had served a privileged few while leaving ordinary Poles behind.
From potential allies to bitter enemies
For much of the 1990s, Polish politics was dominated by the rivalry between parties with roots in Solidarity and those descended from the former communist establishment.
That changed in 2005, when the post-communist left collapsed at the polls and two parties from the Solidarity camp emerged as the main contenders for power.
Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform and PiS, founded by the Kaczyński brothers, had actually been expected to form a coalition. Both wanted to reform the Third Republic, although they disagreed about how far those changes should go.
PiS promised a Fourth Republic, combining greater social protection with an overhaul of institutions it considered compromised by the communist past. PO favored more liberal economic and institutional reforms.
But the coalition talks collapsed, and the two would-be partners became bitter rivals. Over the following years, their competition dominated Polish politics.
Tusk and President Lech Kaczyński regularly clashed over their constitutional powers, at one point even quarreling over who had the right to represent Poland at EU summits.
And the old argument about the legitimacy of the Third Republic was still very much alive. In 2009, Lech Kaczyński told a Solidarity conference that Poles had concluded that “the state does not belong to them.”
The crash changed everything
Then came Smolensk, and the rivalry took on an altogether darker character. The April 2010 plane crash killed President Kaczyński and 95 others.
For many PiS supporters, Smolensk confirmed their distrust of the state under Tusk. The political divide increasingly became a question of patriotism, with opponents accused of betraying Poland itself.
By December 2015, Jarosław Kaczyński was denouncing those who criticized his government abroad as the “worst sort of Poles,” accusing them of perpetuating a tradition of national betrayal.
Politics becomes a constitutional battle
But the long history of Poland’s political divisions should not obscure who was responsible for turning the rivalry into a constitutional crisis. That happened in 2015, when PiS returned to power and set about reshaping the Constitutional Tribunal.
The outgoing PO-led parliament had overstepped its powers by appointing two judges to seats that should have been filled by its successor. PiS, however, went much further. It refused to recognize three judges whose appointments the Tribunal had ruled valid and elected its own replacements instead.
PiS then tightened its grip on the Tribunal, rewriting the rules governing its work and refusing to publish some of its judgments.
When Tusk returned to power in 2023 promising to restore the rule of law, he found that PiS’s appointees still dominated the Tribunal. The opposition had lost parliament but retained influence over a court that could frustrate his efforts to undo the damage.
Tusk’s government tried to break the deadlock. In 2024, its parliamentary majority passed legislation requiring future Tribunal judges to be elected by a three-fifths majority, forcing parties to seek support beyond their own ranks. But President Andrzej Duda referred the legislation to the Constitutional Tribunal for review, leaving the proposed reforms in limbo.
Things became even more contentious under his successor, Karol Nawrocki. This year, after leaving several vacancies unfilled, parliament elected new judges to replace those whose terms had expired, but Nawrocki refused to receive the oaths of five of them. The Tribunal’s existing leadership then refused to admit them, leaving the court’s composition in dispute.
That was the impasse that finally erupted into Friday’s confrontation. There are legitimate legal questions about the government’s response, but any assessment of what happened must also take account of the presidential obstruction that preceded it and the damage done to the Tribunal over the previous decade.
When the referee becomes the battleground
It was inevitable that Poland’s political struggle would reach the Constitutional Tribunal. The court decides how far a government can go in reshaping the state, while its judges serve nine-year terms, allowing a party to retain influence long after losing an election.
That made the Tribunal a valuable prize for PiS and explains Tusk’s struggle to reclaim it. But Poland’s deep polarization means that any reboot he achieves is likely to be rejected by a future right-wing government.
Almost four decades after the compromise that gave birth to modern Polish democracy, there is still no end in sight to the struggle over who gets to enforce its rules.