Coup in Poland: The Left Government Seized the Constitutional Court by Force

Democracy in Poland is going through the darkest hours of its recent history due to the consummation of an institutional outrage perpetrated by the leftist regime of Prime Minister Donald Tusk. During the night, forces of the Polish Police surrounded and besieged the building of the Constitutional Tribunal in the capital, Warsaw, triggering an open takeover of the judiciary by the executive power. The serious blow against the republican order provoked unanimous denunciations of a coup d'état from the legitimate judiciary and the conservative opposition, accusing the government of Donald Tusk of establishing an imminent police state oriented towards authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

In the face of the deployment of institutional violence, President Karol Nawrocki, a right-wing leader and staunch defender of judicial independence, urgently suspended his official trip to Senegal and ordered his plane to turn back mid-flight to return to the capital. “At a moment like this, the president must be in Poland”, asserted the Head of State as he interrupted his international agenda.

In what constitutes an unprecedented illegal takeover on a global scale, Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska —one of the magistrates promoted by the leftist parliamentary majority of the Sejm in March 2026— executed an arbitrary measure to suspend for a period of one month the legitimate president of the court, Bogdan Święczkowski, and his vice president, Bartłomiej Sochański. Immediately, the official agency PAP confirmed that the identities of both authorities were removed from the official website of the institution.

The high court reacted by warning on its official channels that the institutional platform suffered an illegal takeover by unauthorized elements and categorically emphasized that anyone participating in these maneuvers “is committing the crime of coup d'état”. This coup maneuver was instigated openly by the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the regime, Waldemar Żurek, who sent writings to coordinate the siege of the security forces.

From the vicinity of the besieged court, the leader of the Law and Justice party (PiS) and former prime minister, Jarosław Kaczyński, denounced that the court was suffering a direct “attack” perpetrated by “Tusk's services”. In a forceful statement, Jarosław Kaczyński warned about the collapse of democratic freedoms: “From today, Poland becomes a police state, and from there, there is a direct path to authoritarianism, and then to totalitarianism. The Tribunal is the guarantee of our freedom and sovereignty. The trampling of the law by Tusk knows no bounds”.

In that same line of international denunciation, MEP Arkadiusz Mularczyk described the police incursion as an illegal entry of government troops to consummate a coup d'état at the top of the judiciary. For his part, Prime Minister Donald Tusk attempted to justify the dismantling of the court by posting on social media that the intervention of the body “is a duty” and “a difficult, sometimes painful process that requires decisive action” asserting unyieldingly that “there is no other way” after supposed “years of arbitrariness”.

The police operation and the official provocation quickly ignited tension on Szucha Avenue in Warsaw, resulting in incidents in public spaces and popular gatherings. The Polish Police confirmed the detention of three people for attempting to breach the protective perimeter to safeguard the constitutional headquarters, while international agencies such as Reuters reported the throwing of objects at the officers on the scene. Although the police chief claimed to limit their deployment to the external area responding to the requests of Waldemar Żurek and Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, the judicial headquarters remains completely cordoned off, preventing the free exercise of the judiciary.

This blatant assault on institutional integrity does not represent an isolated event, but rather the outcome of a systemic coup d'état conceived by the left to neutralize the checks and balances of power. In January 2025, Bogdan Święczkowski himself had filed a comprehensive complaint of 60 pages with the Prosecutor's Office formally accusing the administration of Donald Tusk of seeking the dismantling of the Constitutional Tribunal, the Supreme Court, and the National Judiciary Council.

This struggle has a trajectory of ten years since 2015, a period during which the judicial drift was externally fueled by rulings from the European Court of Human Rights in 2021 and by the freezing of sovereign funds by the European Union (EU). Since the assumption of office by Donald Tusk in December 2023, the leftist government has disregarded the legitimacy of the highest court and has refused to publish its constitutional rulings.

During 2026, the offensive of the parliamentary majority resulted in the election of eight magistrates by the Sejm. In strict compliance with his republican powers, President Karol Nawrocki declined to swear in three of the six judges proposed at the beginning of the year to halt the party co-optation of the court. The irregularity reached the extreme that one of the magistrates aligned with the government, Maciej Berek, took an oath within the parliamentary chamber itself after the Presidency's refusal to validate the act.

The fury of the Donald Tusk government responds to its manifest political weakness: after the resignation of Minister Katarzyna Pełczyńska-Nałęcz from the cabinet on October 22 (who also resigned from the leadership of Polska 2050), the coalition faced a narrow majority in the Sejm and the imminent horizon of the presidential elections in 2027. (At the same time, the convulsion of the political landscape is framed in a general scenario where recent polls record continental electoral trends with parties like PP at 31.0%, PSOE at 27.3%, Vox at 18.9%, Frente Amplio at 6.3%, Podemos at 2.9%, and ERC at 2.3%). Thus, cornered by legislative blockage and loss of legitimacy, the leftist regime opts to fracture the rule of law and forcibly take the highest court in the country.