Tusk tells Poland the tribunal will work as the constitution says, after a Saturday of palace talks that moved neither side

Two men are now speaking for Poland's top court, and neither accepts the other's account of what the law allows. On Saturday evening Prime Minister Donald Tusk went on television to answer the night before, when President Karol Nawrocki turned his plane back from Senegal, entered the Constitutional Tribunal in the middle of the night and declared that a constitutional body had been seized by force.

Tusk framed his government's side as patience rewarded and then obstructed. The parliamentary majority, he said, waited calmly for the terms of judges appointed under the previous Law and Justice government to expire. The Sejm then elected new judges, the judges took their oath in parliament, but the president did not receive that oath, and tribunal president Bogdan Swieczkowski refused to let the elected judges do their work. He said no politician, including the president, has the authority to enter a court or tribunal, issue instructions to judges or intimidate them, a direct reference to Nawrocki's entry into the building. I am certain that the Constitutional Tribunal will function as it should, Tusk said. Also, independently of me and in line with the constitution.

What set the speech off was Friday's move inside the court. The tribunal announced late on Friday that its longest serving judge, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, had suspended Swieczkowski and his deputy Bartlomiej Sochanski for one month and taken charge of the court herself, over what she described as obstruction of the newly elected judges and irregularities in assigning cases. The suspended leadership rejected her authority and called the move a coup. Riot police have guarded the building since Friday afternoon, and several hundred protesters gathered outside demanding Swieczkowski's reinstatement. The justice minister separately filed five motions to lift the immunity of the two suspended men.

Nawrocki spent Saturday the way he had promised in his overnight statement, in consultations with the leaders of the parliamentary groups at the Presidential Palace. By the afternoon no breakthrough had been announced by either camp. The next fixed date is Tuesday, November 3, when Korwin-Piotrowska has called a general assembly of the tribunal's judges, with the court's 2027 budget among the business. Who chairs that assembly, and whose orders the court's staff obey when it opens, is the whole dispute in one room.