When Poland’s centrist government sent the riot police late on Friday to seal off the country’s Constitutional Tribunal amid a long standoff over control of the court, its right-wing enemies accused it of staging a criminal “coup d’état.”
Now, Russia has jumped in, too, fanning claims of a putsch by Prime Minister Donald Tusk and amplifying attacks on Poland’s pro-European government by hard-right politicians at home and abroad.
Mr. Tusk, long reviled by Moscow because of his strong support for Ukraine, sent police officers to the court after right-wing protesters gathered outside to denounce the suspension of its chief justice, an ally of Poland’s former governing party, Law and Justice.
Dmitri Medvedev, a former Russian president who is now vice chairman of the Kremlin’s security council and a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin, declared on Sunday that “a constitutional coup is underway in Poland.”
Claims of a coup at the Constitutional Tribunal, the focus of a decade-long political struggle over the Polish judiciary, have dominated attacks in recent days on Mr. Tusk by his right-wing enemies at home and Kremlin-friendly European politicians like Marine Le Pen of France, Nigel Farage of Britain and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands.
Right-wing allies of the suspended chief justice, Bogdan Swieczkowski, who over the weekend still controlled the tribunal’s social media account, accused their rivals of “committing the crime” of a putsch,
a charge quickly taken up by a swarm of commentators on X, Telegram and internet bulletin boards.
Referring in a speech over the weekend to often false claims on social media of violence and police brutality at the court, Mr. Tusk said, “They are using an army of Russian bots on the internet.”
Russia and Europe’s E.U.-skeptic hard right seem eager to inflame Polish tensions in the hope of weakening the Poland’s staunchly pro-Ukraine and pro-European Union government at a time when Moscow is working hard to undermine Europe’s support for Ukraine.
Those efforts suffered setbacks with the election defeat in April of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, a longtime opponent of helping Ukraine; and of Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia’s longtime leader, on Oct. 25. Mr. Vucic had resisted imposing sanctions on Russia and met regularly with Mr. Putin, even as he turned a blind eye to the sale of large quantities of Serbian weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.
The victors in Serbia’s recent election, a largely leaderless and diverse new movement called Student List, Students Win, say there will be no sharp turn away from friendly relations with Russia. But in a sign that the mood in Belgrade may be shifting, the Serbian Central Bank announced on Saturday that it was shutting down Alta Bank, a lender that Russian citizens and companies had used to transfer funds to and from Russia.
The prosecutor’s office for organized crime said on Monday it had arrested the bank’s Croatia-born Serbian owner and two executives in connection with an investigation into the illegal removal of nearly $400 million from the bank’s vault.
Poland stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from Serbia in relation to Russia and has been a frequent target of abuse, disinformation campaigns and sabotage operations by Moscow.
Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, said on Sunday in a lengthy post on Telegram that Poland faced “collapse and tragedy” akin to the 2014 political crisis in Ukraine that led to the downfall of President Viktor F. Yanukovych.
Mr. Yanukovych fled to Russia in February 2014 after months of street protests against him in Kyiv, opening the way for a new government that Russia immediately denounced as dominated by Nazi nationalists, a false claim used by Mr. Putin to justify his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Mr. Tusk’s government, the foreign ministry spokeswoman said, was struggling “to steer away from a bloody downward spiral and back into a legal framework.”
There has been no bloodshed at the Polish court, only minor scuffles between police officers and a small group of protesters who support Law and Justice, a hard-right nationalist party.
Russian officials and propaganda outlets have frequently amplified the accusations of European nationalists and far-left groups of brutal repression by mainstream political forces, cheering on the Alternative for Germany party as well as rioters in France and Albania.
Mr. Tusk, in his speech over the weekend defending the deployment of riot police officers outside the court, said of the widespread accusations by Polish right-wing politicians of a coup: “It’s no coincidence they are finding support among pro-Russian forces worldwide.”
Accusing Polish officials of hypocrisy, Ms. Zakharova said the standoff at Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal “is essentially the very same thing they supported and blessed among their Ukrainian neighbors 12 years ago.”
Mr. Medvedev, the former Russian president, also compared Poland’s fracas over the court to events in Ukraine, claiming on X that “liberals — protégés of Brussels-backed Tusk — are hounding the conservatives from the Law and Justice party” and that “the method used is exactly the same as in neo-Nazi Ukraine.”
The dispute over the Constitutional Tribunal dates back a decade to when Law and Justice came to power in 2015 and refused to seat justices already appointed by Parliament, naming its own right-wing judges instead. Years later, Europe’s highest court, the European Court of Justice, ruled this illegal and declared the tribunal’s decision invalid.
After Law and Justice lost an election in 2023, a new coalition government led by Mr. Tusk sought to undo what it saw as the previous administration’s degradation of judicial independence but was blocked by the president, an ally of Law and Justice’s who has used his largely ceremonial powers to prevent new judges from being sworn in.
The current president, Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist former historian elected last year and, like his predecessor, an ally of the previous governing party, has kept five judges appointed by Parliament from taking their seats on the bench by refusing to attend their swearing-in ceremonies.
Under Polish law, the president has no veto power over appointments to the Constitutional Tribunal, but judges are supposed to be sworn in during ceremonies “before the president.”
These new judges, who took their oaths in Parliament while declaring they were doing so “before the president,” on Friday entered the court, and one of them, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, announced the suspension of the chief justice, Mr. Swieczkowski, an ally of Mr. Nawrocki’s who insists the new judges are impostors because they have not been sworn in personally by the president.
This prompted Mr. Nawrocki, who was flying to Senegal at the time, to turn around his plane midair, rush back to Warsaw and push his way through the police cordon around the court. He scuffled with the new judges, denouncing them as illegitimate.
Alisa Dogramadzieva contributed reporting from Belgrade, Serbia.
The post Russia Senses Opportunity in Polish Political Turmoil appeared first on New York Times.
