Poland's Constitutional Tribunal Crisis: A Court With Two Leaders Faces Its Quorum Test

On the evening of Friday 30 October, a notice appeared on the website of Poland's Constitutional Tribunal that read like a change of government inside a single institution. It said that the court's president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and its vice-president, Bartłomiej Sochański, had been given a one-month break from their duties, and that Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska would lead the court in their place. Police began guarding the court building that afternoon, and several hundred protesters gathered outside demanding Święczkowski's reinstatement. The Tribunal's own social media account called the move an unlawful takeover and a coup. By the weekend, Poland had a constitutional court with two rival accounts of who runs it, and neither side was backing down.

The dispute did not start on Friday. It goes back to 2015, when the then-ruling nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS) tried to appoint Constitutional Tribunal judges to seats already filled by the previous government, beginning a decade-long fight over who legitimately sits on the court. The current chapter opened earlier this year, when President Karol Nawrocki, who is politically aligned with PiS, refused to swear in several judges nominated by the parliamentary majority, while Święczkowski denied those judges access to the court. Korwin-Piotrowska is one of the judges at the centre of that fight: she says she was duly elected by the Sejm, Poland's lower house, and that, as the judge with the longest service, she was entitled to step in. The presidency disputes whether her oath counts, since it was not taken before the president himself.

Saturday brought consultations but no agreement. Nawrocki cut short an official visit to Africa and flew home, met senior judges overnight and political leaders on Saturday, and accused the government of staging a forced takeover of a constitutional body. Prime Minister Donald Tusk, in a televised address on Saturday, said the court would now function independently and in line with Poland's constitution, and offered no procedure for swearing in the disputed judges. On Saturday the European Commission said the appointment of eight new tribunal members fell within the constitutional powers of the Sejm, and that Polish authorities must ensure the tribunal operates in line with the constitution and the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, meanwhile, said the legal grounds for the 30 October suspension order were questionable. Every institution that has spoken so far has spoken past the others.

That is why Tuesday's general assembly matters more than an ordinary meeting. Korwin-Piotrowska has called the judges together at 15:30 Warsaw time to approve the Tribunal's 2027 budget, the same budget that, by her account, Święczkowski's refusal to admit the disputed judges had prevented the court from adopting. But a general assembly can only take binding decisions with a quorum of 10 of the court's 15 judges, and getting to 10 is the whole fight. Figures from PiS have advised judges not to attend, doubting that the gathering is a legitimate assembly at all, and at least one senior judge has been reported as refusing to come. There is a recent precedent for failure: a budget assembly in July collapsed when judges walked out over colleagues who had not been admitted. The budget is a useful pretext for a meeting, but the real question on the table is who counts as a judge.

I read this as something larger than a personnel row, and that is why it belongs on a site that tracks predictions rather than just news. A constitutional tribunal's authority rests on a shared agreement about who sits on it; once that agreement breaks, the court cannot credibly settle other people's disputes, because its own composition is the dispute. The timing sharpens the stakes: Poland's next parliamentary election is about a year away, and the court that would rule on election law and legislation is the court that cannot agree on its own leadership. A failed assembly would leave the rival claims intact and the budget unapproved, which is itself a kind of answer — a court that cannot convene cannot govern itself. A successful one would not end the argument either, since PiS has already signalled it would not recognise decisions taken by an assembly convened by Korwin-Piotrowska, but it would at least show that ten judges can be found who are willing to sit in the same room and vote.

My expectation is that the assembly is more likely to fall short than to reach its quorum. The boycott advice, the reported refusal, the July collapse and the contested oaths all point the same way, against a threshold that requires support well beyond either camp on its own. The counterweights are real: the budget genuinely needs approving, the European Commission has backed the Sejm's appointments, and Korwin-Piotrowska herself has said she expects the meeting to hold. But a quorum of ten in a fifteen-member court split down the middle is a high bar, and a court this divided rarely clears a high bar on the first attempt. Tuesday afternoon in Warsaw will tell us whether this is a court in crisis or a court that can still convene.