by Roger Kimball
What is a stake in this ongoing confrontation? Writ large, it is the choice between Polish sovereignty and Polish submission to the globalist agenda of the EU.
The governing question pertaining to the attempted coup d’état in Poland Friday night was neatly expressed in the title of John Fonte’s brilliant 2011 book: Sovereignty or Submission? Fonte was writing about America. Would Americans, he wanted to know, be ruled by themselves? Or would they be ruled by others? In other words, who governs? The people or the unelected bureaucrats? It is one of the central political questions of our times, as applicable to Europe, Australia, Canada, and South America as it is to the United States.
Increasingly, it seems, the answer is “the bureaucrats.” Just a week ago, Brazil went through an extremely dodgy election in which a last-minute, illegal extension of voting yielded the Communist Lula da Silva a victory over Flávio Bolsonaro. The EU was pleased by, and perhaps contributed to, the outcome. Or consider what happened in Hungary. In May, Péter Magyar defeated Viktor Orbán. Magyar moved quickly to ban his opponents from ever running again and even started legal proceedings against some. In Germany, the AfD is wildly popular with the people, but not with the ruling party or the commissars in the EU. Hence, it is subject to unending harassment and may be banned altogether. In France, Marine Le Pen was put under house arrest and required to wear an electronic ankle monitor. In Romania, when the “wrong” candidate ran, the election was cancelled, and the winner was banned from running. This is what Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU, means by “democracy”: submission to the diktats of the European Union.
In Poland, the usual mold may be being broken. As I write, we are still in a fog-of-war situation. Many things have been tossed up into the air. It is not entirely clear where they all will land.
A little background. Poland is a parliamentary republic with a prime minister and a president. The former is head of the government and handles the day-to-day executive functions. The latter is head of state and handles foreign policy and higher-level executive functions and is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He also has the power to veto legislation and appoint judges. The prime minister since 2023 has been Donald Tusk, an EU poodle and liberal authoritarian. The president since 2025 is Karol Nawrocki, an anti-EU, Poland-first populist who wants Poland to keep its own currency, have control of its borders, and sharply limit immigration.
Here’s what happened. On Friday night, Nawrocki departed on an official trip to Senegal. His plane was over Spain when he received word that Tusk had unilaterally suspended some duly appointed judges and other officials, elevated a judge loyal to him to the chief spot, and called in riot police to surround Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal. Here’s an abbreviated timeline put together by one knowledgeable observer:
1. The left-wing Prime Minister Donald Tusk attempted to appoint eight judges to the Constitutional Court, although he was only allowed to appoint three.
2. The right-conservative President Karol Nawrocki administered the oath of office only to three judges, as prescribed by law.
3. Tusk organized a parallel swearing-in for the other five by administering the oath to them himself, although the constitution stipulates that only the president may do this.
4. Nawrocki left the country for a scheduled trip to Senegal.
5. One of the judges illegally sworn in by Tusk ordered the removal of the President of the Court, the right-conservative Bogdan Święczkowski.
6. Tusk ordered the police to block access to the court and thus deny entry to the President of the Supreme Court.
7. Nawrocki interrupted his trip and returned to Poland in haste.
8. In the night to Friday, he personally positioned himself in front of the court building and struggled with the police to gain access.
9. Once he was in the court building, he removed the five judges illegally sworn in by Tusk and granted the President of the Supreme Court access to his office.
What is at stake in this ongoing confrontation? Writ large, it is the choice between Polish sovereignty and Polish submission to the globalist agenda of the EU. Dominik Tarczyński, a Polish Member of the European Parliament, summarized the situation and the stakes very well:
In Poland, we have a liberal-left government led by Donald Tusk, who is the Prime Minister. What is happening right now with the Constitutional Tribunal is that they want to take it over and fill it with their own people.
Why? Because they want to get rid of the Polish currency, bring us into the eurozone, and eliminate our secure borders. They are being pushed by the Germans, who want to spread the burden of illegal migration and send migrants to Poland.
First of all, the Polish złoty is our constitutionally protected currency. They have to change the Constitution to replace it, and without the Constitutional Tribunal, they cannot do that.
So, number one, they want to get rid of our currency and force us to adopt the euro and join the eurozone. Then they want to take our gold reserves, the largest in the European Union, to Frankfurt, to the European Central Bank, which is a German-based institution.
They also want to open our borders. And they want to make sure that when they lose the next elections, which are coming next year, the Constitutional Tribunal will be unable to do anything to stop their actions or reverse what they have done.
There are many more reasons, but I want you to understand one thing: they are under German influence. They are globalists, and we are fighting not just for Poland but for Europe.
A natural question is, why now? Why are we seeing all these anti-democratic initiatives being mounted under the guise of “saving democracy” just now? I think this chap got to the nub of the answer:
Because the globalist project is losing its grip. They lost the media war: people get their information elsewhere, compare, verify, and no longer trust the official line. They lost the trust of the people. And the countries that are bouncing back, the ones finding their energy, their birth rates, their pride again, are precisely the ones that understood that the Brussels machine, as it runs today, is not the cure but the disease. Poles elected Nawrocki against the system’s candidate. The message was clear.
Judging from a statement issued Saturday by President Nawrocki, order seems to be in the process of being restored. There are calls for an immediate vote of no confidence and the removal of the ruling apparat. Perhaps that will happen. As I say, the situation in Poland is fluid, and the authoritarian forces represented by people like Donald Tusk have been stymied but not yet defeated. Poland is lucky to have a strong, patriotic, and effective leader like Karol Nawrocki. But the battle there is but a single front in a much larger war for legitimacy.
Photo: A pin depicting Poland's President Karol Nawrocki is seen on a protester's jacket during a rally outside the headquarters of Poland's Constitutional Court in Warsaw on October 31, 2026, after police blocked access to the building. Poland's President Karol Nawrocki called off a visit to Africa in mid-flight as riot police deployed around the country's constitutional court on October 30 following the suspension of its chief justice in a battle between the centrist government and the nationalist right. Dozens of police guarded the entrance to the court as followers of the opposition right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) protested the ousting of constitutional court president Bogdan Swieczkowski. (Photo by Sergei GAPON / AFP via Getty Images)
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/11/01/sovereignty-or-submission-polands-battle-against-the-eurocrats/
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