Poland’s constitutional crisis is not simply a courtroom drama or a clash between political parties. It is a human story about what happens when institutions meant to hold a country together become weapons in a struggle for power, and when the story people tell about that struggle matters more than the facts on the ground. At its core, the crisis is a warning about oversimplification. Domestic and international actors have reduced a deeply tangled situation to a simple story of good versus evil, and in doing so they have made compromise almost impossible. In such an environment, online extremism and disinformation flourish, because angry, clear-cut narratives travel faster than careful explanations. Foreign powers, too, have moved in to exploit the chaos, not because they care about Polish democracy, but because a weakened Poland serves their interests. Yet the uncomfortable truth is that Poland did not need foreign help to reach this point. The crisis was made in Warsaw, by Polish politicians, through a series of decisions that steadily eroded trust in the judiciary. Once that trust was gone, every legal argument became a political one, and every political disagreement became a battle for survival.
The roots of the crisis stretch back to 2015, when President Andrzej Duda, backed by Law and Justice, took office. The outgoing Civic Platform government tried to stack the Constitutional Tribunal by appointing five judges when it was only entitled to three. Duda refused to recognise any of them, and the incoming PiS-controlled parliament appointed five judges of its own, including replacements for three positions that had already been lawfully filled. The Tribunal itself ruled that three of the Civic Platform appointments were valid and two were premature, but PiS ignored that ruling and pushed through its own appointees, then introduced legislation to force the early re-election of the Tribunal’s president. It is true that Civic Platform contributed to the initial mess, but PiS bears the principal responsibility for turning a political dispute into a systemic institutional crisis. The damage was not just internal. In 2021, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in the case of Xero Flor v. Poland that a panel including an improperly appointed judge was not a tribunal established by law. In December 2025, the Court of Justice of the European Union went further, finding that Poland was in breach of EU law because of the Tribunal’s composition and its rejection of fundamental EU principles. These were not abstract legal victories. They were concrete signs that Poland’s judicial system had become unrecognisable to the very institutions that were supposed to guarantee fairness.
When Donald Tusk returned to government in 2023, many hoped the crisis would be resolved. It was not. Tusk’s coalition initially refused to recognise the Tribunal or publish its rulings, but as judicial terms expired, it changed course and sought to appoint new members. On 13 March 2026, the Sejm elected six judges, but President Karol Nawrocki, backed by PiS, accepted oaths from only two of them, leaving the Tribunal with eleven members. The remaining four judges took their oaths in the Sejm on 9 April and formally sent them to the Presidential Chancellery, but Nawrocki and the Tribunal’s president, Bogdan Święczkowski, continued to exclude them. In May, the European Court of Human Rights issued interim measures requiring the authorities not to obstruct the judges from exercising their duties. In October, the Venice Commission clarified that the president has no discretion to review parliamentary appointments, and that oaths may be taken without his physical participation if he refuses or delays the procedure. Nawrocki nevertheless refused to accept the appointments. Then, on 30 October, senior judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska suspended Święczkowski and his deputy for thirty days, assumed leadership of the Tribunal, and barred Święczkowski from entering the building. The legal basis for her intervention is disputed, but the message was clear: the crisis had moved from the courtroom to the streets of power.
In the days that followed, the confrontation became deeply personal. Tusk and Nawrocki accused each other of destroying the state. Nawrocki called the suspension of Święczkowski an unconstitutional seizure of a state institution and convened consultations with parliamentary parties, but no compromise emerged. Tusk insisted that the crisis could be solved without constitutional amendments if Nawrocki simply recognised the judges lawfully elected by the Sejm. The international dimension quickly made things worse. Europe’s far right rallied behind PiS and Nawrocki: Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella in France, George Simion in Romania and Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom all defended Nawrocki, with some denouncing a “coup” by Tusk and the EU. MAGA influencers in the United States joined in, portraying the events as a judicial coup by globalist liberals against conservative forces, and spreading disinformation. Russia also moved into the controversy. On 31 October, Dmitry Medvedev described the events as a “constitutional coup” and accused “liberals around Tusk, Brussels’ protégé” of oppressing PiS conservatives. Tusk responded by framing the crisis in geopolitical terms, accusing Nawrocki and the opposition of advancing Russian strategic interests and alleging that pro-Russian forces and bots were supporting one side of the conflict. But no publicly verifiable evidence has established direct Russian involvement in Nawrocki’s actions. Polish fact-checking organisation Demagog.pl warned that mutual accusations of acting as agents of influence, especially without credible evidence, deepen polarisation and undermine trust in public debate. That warning matters: not everything happens because of Russian interference, and national politicians whose positions happen to align with Russia’s are not necessarily Russian agents. They may simply share the same ideas and benefit from the same narratives.
The pattern is not new. In August, the crisis in Ceuta was not caused by far-right forces, Russia or the United States, but all of them jumped on it immediately, spreading the same stories: the EU is doomed, Muslim migrants are violent parasites destroying white Christian societies, the Great Replacement is happening. In September, youth protests in France and elsewhere in Europe were not caused by foreign actors, but the same networks were ready to describe them as violent uprisings of Muslim migrants incompatible with European societies, who should be sent back. Now, with Poland, the same recurring scheme is unfolding again. European far-right forces, Russia and MAGA influencers are all spreading the same narrative about a judicial coup by globalist liberal forces supported by the EU. The alignment is not accidental. Russia has an interest in weakening European countries that support Ukraine and in boosting far-right parties that want to end that support. Far-right parties have an interest in convincing voters that their Eurosceptic, anti-Ukrainian, pro-Russian positions are the most reasonable and beneficial for ordinary people. The United States, or at least influential voices within it, has an interest in weakening the EU, which it sees as a transnational body that undermines political liberty and sovereignty. These actors do not need to coordinate with each other. Their interests overlap, and the messages they produce reinforce each other. European societies are therefore targeted by a stream of overlapping narratives that make it harder and harder to see what is actually happening.
The tragedy of Poland’s crisis is that it feeds on the very thing it destroys: trust. Every legal manoeuvre, every refusal to recognise an appointment, every accusation of treason or coup makes the next step easier and the path back to compromise harder. The international actors who exploit the crisis are not interested in solving it. They want it to continue, because chaos serves their purposes. But the responsibility for resolving it lies with Polish politicians, and with Polish voters who must demand better than slogans. The crisis will not be solved by shouting about coups or by calling everyone who disagrees a Russian agent. It will be solved by respecting institutional rules, by accepting that courts must be independent even when they rule against you, and by rebuilding the common ground that has been lost. The rest of Europe should watch carefully, because the same forces that are tearing Poland apart are at work everywhere. The lesson is not that foreign interference is the root of all evil, or that domestic politicians are innocent victims. The lesson is that when democratic institutions are weakened from within, when facts are treated as optional, and when every opponent is an enemy, then the country becomes vulnerable to manipulation from outside. Poland did not need Russia to create its constitutional crisis. But the longer the crisis lasts, the more useful it becomes to Russia, and to everyone else who profits from a divided Europe. The only way out is to resist the seduction of simple stories, to demand evidence, and to remember that democracy is not a battlefield where one side must be destroyed. It is a shared house that needs constant repair.