Poland Constitutional Tribunal police cordon

di Pavellim: Donald Tusk

A state coup is what the deputy chairman of Poland's Constitutional Tribunal called it, and the scene outside the building in Warsaw makes that word hard to argue with. Police formed a cordon around the court, residents took to the streets, and the chairman himself was stopped from walking into the building he leads. His supporters say the suspension is illegal and that he is still the lawful head of the court. The paperwork behind all this: a judge put in place by Donald Tusk's coalition majority, though the president never swore him in, ordered both the chairman and deputy chairman suspended. Then Tusk's Minister of Justice, who also holds the Prosecutor General job, handed over 224 pages asking that their judicial immunity be removed. President Karol Nawrocky was in Senegal when it went down. He turned the plane around. Back in Warsaw he tried to get through the police line, and officers acting on the government's orders blocked him and his security detail. Once he was inside, he didn't soften anything: the judges are not legitimate, the seizure has to stop. His exact line was "You are not judges of the Constitutional Tribunal." One Polish journalist reached for 1981, when the communist government declared martial law, and said this is how seriously the people who lived through that era are taking it. Fair comparison or not, that's the register we're in. And none of this dropped out of nowhere. Two weeks earlier Tusk got his closest ally, a sitting minister, appointed to the same court. The president refused to swear him in, so they held the ceremony in parliament and made a point of ignoring the head of state. For close to three years the government has brushed off every ruling the Tribunal has issued. Court staff faced charges for keeping government-appointed judges out. Parliament voted to cancel judge appointments going back to 2018. State funding is being withheld from the main opposition party. Public television was pulled off air in the government's first week. So this isn't ordinary political friction. It's a fight over who gets to say what complies with the Constitution, and who actually controls the institutions. Poland has been through martial law once. Nobody needs the sequel.