Polish President Karol Nawrocki cut short a trip toward Senegal on 30 October 2026 and returned to Warsaw as the Constitutional Tribunal crisis escalated, the Kyiv Independent reports. “At a moment like this, the president must be in Poland. I am cutting short my flight to Senegal. I am returning,” he wrote on X.

The flare-up follows the reported suspension of court president Bogdan Święczkowski and deputy Bartłomiej Sochański — a step attributed to judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, elected by parliament but whose status the sitting leadership rejects. She has called a judges’ general assembly for 3 November.

Prosecutor General Waldemar Żurek filed five requests to lift judicial immunity (four on Święczkowski, one on Sochański), backed, he said, by 50 volumes of files; the requests are not criminal charges. At protests some threw objects at police and breached a perimeter; three people were detained.

Jarosław Kaczyński accused Tusk’s government of turning Poland into a “police state.” Święczkowski reached the tribunal grounds after a protester cut a gate chain, but police blocked him from entering the building. Tusk reiterated that restoring the rule of law is “difficult, sometimes painful.”

The crisis also saw Poland’s ambassador to China, Jakub Kumoch, resign; Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said the diplomat no longer represented the country. The Tusk camp and the Nawrocki-aligned opposition remain locked over judicial appointments.

Image: Belweder Palace, Warsaw (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0).

Sources consulted: Polish president cuts short foreign trip as constitutional crisis escalates - Kyiv Independent.