Ukraine, Albania, Armenia, Romania, Serbia, now Poland.

Donald Tusk (Poland’s recurring Prime Minister) appointed a new judge to “suspend” two other judges of the Constitutional Court—that is, the judges were locked out, and the Court was surrounded and effectively blockaded on Saturday night, by national police and security forces. Karol Nawrocki, the Polish President, and a former professional boxer, turned his plane around from a foreign visit, returned to Warsaw, and forced his way into the Court building that night.

On Sunday, Nov. 1, Andrew Korybko’s newsletter reported the issue as follows: “The similarity between Zelensky’s earlier successful judicial coup and Tusk’s attempted one is that both leaders suspended the heads of their respective constitutional courts (technically the Constitutional Tribunal in Poland’s case) amidst a highly sensitive dispute, in order to centralize their own power. In Poland’s case, the aforesaid dispute is over the prior conservative government allegedly stacking the Tribunal, which the ruling liberals blame for them tending to prioritize Polish law over EU law.”

Also on Sunday, Conservative Polish MP-turned-MEP, Dominik Tarczyński, posted what he said was the plan behind Tusk’s open challenge to the President: Tusk will try to oust Nawrocki as President, take over effective control of the central bank of Poland, and introduce the euro as the country’s currency. The Polish currency, the zloty, is currently, according to Wikipedia, the most-traded currency in Central and Eastern Europe.

Behind the confrontation of Tusk and Nawrocki, the liberal from Brussels, vs. the Polish nationalist who surprised everyone by winning last year’s election, is the fact that Poland’s Europe-leading growth economy is slowing down, probably to less than 3% when 2026 figures are final—with business investment dragging, in particular. The reason is common to all of Europe: energy price increases, with the loss of Russian energy supply to sanctions and prohibitions.

Poland’s Constitution says that the President can veto legislation, and can appoint judges, ambassadors, and the central bank governor— in Tusk’s view, a real disgrace. Nawrocki, while defending nationalist prerogatives, is a strong proponent of NATO’s encirclement of Russia, with Poland the strongest link holding the chain together at its center “between the three seas,” the Baltic, Black, and Caspian Seas. But he is also aware that Polish farmers do not like Ukraine, nor do Poland’s Jews like Ukraine’s Banderistas.

While protest rallies have broken out, in apparent defense of President Nawrocki, the country is not yet in an upheaval.