While the President Was in the Air

Poland is the large country between Germany and Ukraine.

It belongs to the EU and NATO, is a part of the V4, and it's run by two men who can't stand each other.

Poland's constitution gives it a prime minister who governs and a president who can stop him.

Donald Tusk, the pro-EU prime minister and former European Council president, has been in office since 2023. Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist historian and Trump favourite backed by the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS), narrowly won the presidency in 2025 and has used his veto since, including on a law for €44bn of EU defence loans. Tusk took the loans anyway, by another route.

Between them stands the Constitutional Tribunal.

The EU's top court ruled last December that it isn't an independent court established by law.

Who cares about the Polish constitution?

Tusk's camp says the previous right-wing government packed it. The right says Tusk is seizing it.

Tusk's majority then elected new judges. Nawrocki refused to swear in some of them, and the Tribunal's president, Bogdan Święczkowski, kept them out. A European court ordered him to let them in, and he refused. One of the new judges was, until recently, a minister in Tusk's own government.

Today, Nawrocki flew off to Senegal. While he was in the air, police appeared on the Tribunal's grounds, called in by one of the disputed judges. The judge then declared that she was running the court and suspended Święczkowski for a month. The same day, Tusk's chief prosecutor asked to strip him of immunity. The Tribunal replied that she wasn't a judge and that its website had been hijacked.

Nawrocki turned his plane around. The right is calling it a coup. Police say they never entered the building.

Why now? Poland votes next year. Tusk has spent a year finding ways around a president who blocks him, and the Tribunal is where Nawrocki sends the laws he won't simply veto. It's also the only court in Poland that can rule a political party unconstitutional.

A petition with over 100,000 signatures to ban a far-right party is about to land on the desk of the same chief prosecutor.

This is a country where 52% oppose taking in Ukrainian refugees, and where many fear a direct war with Russia, one they would be first in line to fight. Trump says he wants this war ended, and Nawrocki is his favourite in Warsaw. Tusk is Brussels' favourite.

Brussels decides on Poland's last €12.7bn of recovery funds by the end of the year.

Can anyone see its sticky paws on this?