{"id":105677,"date":"2026-11-03T05:00:02","date_gmt":"2026-11-03T10:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=105677"},"modified":"2026-11-02T16:43:41","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T21:43:41","slug":"the-polish-coup-attempt-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/the-polish-coup-attempt-explained\/","title":{"rendered":"The Polish coup attempt, explained"},"content":{"rendered":"

On his Substack<\/em>, Gawain Towler<\/a> condenses several years of political infighting within Poland to try to explain what happened over the weekend and why:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There is something rather splendidly 19th century about struggling to understand a constitutional problem the other side of Danzig. I’m trying to understand the Poland problem. On Friday night the President of Poland turned his aeroplane round somewhere over Spain. Karol Nawrocki had been on his way to Senegal on a state visit. By the small hours he was in Warsaw, shoving his way past a line of men (and a woman) in suits who were trying to stop him walking through the front door of his own country’s highest court.<\/p>\n

The people in suits called themselves judges. Riot police stood in the road outside. A crowd had gathered, some of them in fancy dress, one in the full armour of a seventeenth-century Polish hussar. Objects were thrown. By morning the President was calling it a forcible takeover of the state, the Prime Minister was on television promising no compromise, and the chief justice of Poland’s Supreme Court was using the words “coup d’\u00e9tat<\/em>“.<\/p>\n

Inside, the suspended chief justice was heard asking whether anyone had a crowbar. At the door the President, a former amateur boxer who once worked as a hotel bouncer, looked at the judges blocking him and said, “You are not real judges”. Five words. It’s the whole argument.<\/p>\n

You’d have struggled to find any of this on the BBC, I’ve looked and failed. Yet it’s the most serious constitutional crisis inside the European Union since Brexit, in a country of 38 million that is the EU’s fifth largest and Britain’s closest NATO ally on the eastern flank. And it’s ours as much as theirs. The judges who tried to bar their own President from the door hold their seats on the say-so of a court in Strasbourg, the European Court of Human Rights, the same court that still binds Britain, the one that grounded the Rwanda flight. In a couple of weeks Andy Burnham sits down with the EU at a summit meant to pull us back towards Brussels. Nobody at the BBC has thought to ask what the Poles are learning about Brussels this week.<\/p>\n

The building is the Constitutional Tribunal. Fifteen judges, elected one at a time by the Polish parliament, the Sejm<\/em>, for nine years each, and sworn in by the President. Its job is to strike down laws that break the constitution. It can’t write a law, only kill one.<\/p>\n

That sounds dry until you ask who decides what counts as a law. In Poland a ruling of the Tribunal is final and binding on everyone, but only once the government prints it in the official gazette. For two years Donald Tusk’s government has simply declined to print the rulings it doesn’t like. The court has gone on judging into thin air.<\/p>\n

Control the Tribunal and you control which laws survive, which ministers can be sacked, which officials can be hauled before a court and whether the President’s veto means anything. Every other quarrel in Warsaw runs through this panelled room.<\/p>\n

The row is older than most of the people shouting about it. In 2015 the outgoing liberal parliament elected five judges on its way out of the door in order to lay a constitutional landmine. The incoming conservative Law and Justice party, PiS, refused to swear them in and put its own people on the bench instead. Brussels howled, opened disciplinary proceedings against Poland and spent eight years calling the court a sham.<\/p>\n

Then Tusk won in October 2023 and the shoe changed foot. His coalition elected new judges. The new President, Nawrocki, elected in June 2025 and no friend of Tusk, refused to swear most of them in, exactly as the other side had done a decade earlier. He has since refused to appoint 46 ordinary judges as well and has hinted he may appoint none at all for his whole five-year term. The European Court of Human Rights ordered the Tribunal to seat four of Tusk’s nominees anyway.<\/p>\n

So on Friday night Tusk’s judges, several of them never sworn in by anyone, and one of them the man Tusk calls his right-hand man, walked into the building and announced that the sitting chief justice was suspended. Not by any vote, not by any court, by a notice on a website.<\/p>\n

The government’s answer is that this is the old catch-the-thief trick. Waldemar \u017burek, the justice minister, says the nationalists spent eight years wrecking the constitution and have found religion only now it suits them. He’s got a point, and it’s the best one his side has. It just doesn’t make two wrongs a right.<\/p>\n

Whoever you blame, one fact is awkward for Tusk. The President has the fresher mandate. Tusk was elected in 2023. Nawrocki was elected two years later, and the most recent time Poles were asked, they chose his side.<\/p>\n

And Tusk has managed something nobody else could. He has united the right. Outside the court on Friday night Jaros\u0142aw Kaczy\u0144ski, the PiS founder, posed for a selfie with Grzegorz Braun, the Polexit campaigner he’d sworn never to govern with. S\u0142awomir Mentzen of the Confederation party told the right to bury its quarrels until Tusk is gone, and his deputy Anna Bry\u0142ka said toppling the Prime Minister was now the “fundamental common goal<\/em>“. Two years spent dividing them, undone in a night.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On his Substack, Gawain Towler condenses several years of political infighting within Poland to try to explain what happened over the weekend and why: There is something rather splendidly 19th century about struggling to understand a constitutional problem the other side of Danzig. I’m trying to understand the Poland problem. On Friday night the President […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[62,84,9,28,53],"tags":[715,1517,766,337,228,720,1301],"class_list":["post-105677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-government","category-law","category-media","category-politics","tag-constitution","tag-coup","tag-democracy","tag-eu","tag-poland","tag-protest","tag-warsaw"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-rut","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105677"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105679,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105677\/revisions\/105679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}