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2026-11-03 Europe
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Game of Thrones in Polish: Tusk vs. Nawrocki
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited
By Sergei Vilensky
A Polish Game of Thrones: Tusk vs. Nawrocki.
[DWUJKA] The protracted political confrontation between the President and Prime Minister of Poland has gone beyond public attacks and has finally escalated into a struggle for control of state institutions. Polish political life seems to be gradually turning into a bad TV series, in which the writers have abandoned a single genre. It blends comedy, political thriller, and even elements of crime drama. As the saying goes, "horses and men are all mixed up..."
The political struggle employs virtually every tool: from social media squabbles and mutual accusations of "working for the Russians" to a war of compromising evidence, scandals involving the airing of dirty laundry from the past, and, finally, a serious institutional crisis.
On opposite sides of the barricade are the Civic Platform party, led by its helmsman, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and the Law and Justice party, which nominated Karol Nawrocki for president. Relations between the two political powers have been strained since the presidential race. However, recently the standoff has noticeably escalated: the two sides have increasingly traded public barbs and attacks, and the media and social media have become a veritable battlefield.
From social media squabbles to a constitutional crisis, the Warsaw "plot," which initially resembled a hilarious comedy in the vein of The Naked Gun, has increasingly evolved into a political thriller with each new episode.
Now, let's take things in order.
On May 26, 2025, just six days before the second round of the presidential election, the Polish publication Onet published a large-scale investigation into Nawrocki's possible involvement in human trafficking (Article 189a of the Polish Criminal Code). The fact is that the future president worked as a security guard at the Grand Hotel in the resort town of Sopot in his youth.
According to his then-colleagues, he assisted local prostitutes and pimps in finding clients among the hotel's guests. Nawrocki categorically denied the accusations and filed a lawsuit. Ultimately, Nawrocki won the election against the candidate of the ruling Civic Coalition party, but his margin of victory was minimal—just over 1.5 percentage points. The difference amounted to only 369,000 votes. It's difficult to say to what extent Onet's publication influenced the election results. However, there is no doubt that from that moment on, relations between the prime minister's party and the president's team became extremely hostile. "The Swan, the Cancer, and the Pike": Who Shapes Poland's Foreign Policy?
Immediately after assuming the presidency, Nawrocki began to forge his own foreign policy: he made strong statements on European integration and Poland's future course within the EU, demonstrated independence in his relations with Washington, and did not coordinate his actions with the government, particularly the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Meanwhile, the Polish Constitution obliges the president to cooperate with the prime minister and the relevant minister. It was precisely over the boundaries of these powers that one of the most heated confrontations unfolded.
For example, Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski refused to support Nawrocki's candidacy for the post of ambassador to Washington—Michal Rachon, a journalist for the state television channel TVP. Rachon had previously conducted several investigative reports on the plane crash near Smolensk on April 10, 2010, which killed Polish President Lech Kaczyński and a significant portion of the country's top military and political leadership.
In his reports, Rachoń promoted conspiracy theories about the events, according to which Donald Tusk allegedly acted in concert with Moscow, was warned in advance by the Russian side of the threat, and deliberately did not fly with the presidential delegation. Naturally, such a candidate could not count on the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when appointed ambassador to the United States.
According to Polish law, ambassadors are appointed and recalled by the president, but he does so on the recommendation of the minister of foreign affairs, approved by the prime minister. Meanwhile, Nawrocki has long been deliberately blocking personnel proposals from the Tusk government. From August 2025 to October 2026, 46 nominations for new ambassadors piled up on his desk. The president has yet to sign a single one. As a result, the Polish Ministry of
Foreign Affairs is forced to send heads of diplomatic missions with a lower status – chargés d'affaires. Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski has also responded. Throughout this standoff, he has repeatedly publicly criticized Karol Nawrocki for his foreign policy and his flirtation with far-right populists from the pro-monarchist Confederation of the Polish Crown party.
Incidentally, the party's leader, Grzegorz Braun, advocates restoring relations with Russia, but his electoral base remains very limited. Moreover, he himself is limiting the potential for expanding his support, including by promoting a fringe anti-Semitic agenda that portrays Jews as enemies of Polish independence and attributes to them secret conspiracies to seize Poland.
The Polish president also received criticism for his ostentatious friendly relations with Donald Trump. In a television broadcast, Sikorski ironically described one of Nawrocki's meetings with the American president as "an exchange of words by the cage during some kind of brawl." He was thus alluding to the two politicians' joint viewing of a mixed martial arts tournament, which took place on October 14, 2025, on the South Lawn of the White House.
THE HOUSING ISSUE RUINED BOTH.
Bulgakov, in his immortal novel, The Master and Margarita, put the famous phrase into the mouth of Woland:
"...well, they're frivolous... well, what can you do... ordinary people... generally speaking, they resemble the old ones... the housing issue only ruined them."
It seems a similar story happened to our heroes: the housing issue also tarnished their political reputations. While Sikorski's case is a moral scandal, Nawrocki's clearly smacks of criminality.
In the spring of 2025, on the eve of the presidential elections, Karol Nawrocki repeatedly claimed during the campaign that he owned only one apartment in Gdańsk. However, investigative journalists from Onet discovered a second apartment—a small one-room apartment in the city's historic center, which he received from an elderly man under a life-long maintenance agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, Nawrocki was obligated to care for the previous owner until his death. However, the man ultimately ended up in a nursing home, and the Nawrocki family bought the apartment from the municipality for just 10% of its assessed value.
The story sparked a major scandal, and the Gdańsk prosecutor's office even launched an investigation. However, after Nawrocki's inauguration, the situation acquired a special legal status: the incumbent president enjoys constitutional immunity, so prosecutors cannot prosecute him under the usual procedure. Article 145 of the Polish Constitution provides for a special procedure—through the State Tribunal.
Some time later, Nawrocki's team launched a counter-information attack on Radosław Sikorski, pulling former Polish Defense Minister Romuald Sheremetyev out of his political mothballs. In an interview, Sheremetyev recalled a story from 1992, when Sikorski, then his deputy, took up residence in the Defense Ministry's representative palace, designed to receive foreign delegations, and refused to vacate it even after the ministry's head demanded it. Ultimately, according to Sheremetyev, he was forced to persuade the then-prime minister to dismiss Sikorski.
Meanwhile, the former Defense Minister raised the topic of Sikorski's possible ties to MI6. As an indirect argument, Sheremetyev recalled his past as a British war correspondent in Afghanistan, where he covered the mujahideen's military operations against Soviet troops from 1986 to 1989. Sheremetyev suggested that such trips to hot spots could hardly have been undertaken without the approval of British intelligence agencies.
It's quite possible that Sheremetyev's interview struck a nerve with Sikorski, prompting the Foreign Minister to reopen the media agenda for the scandal surrounding Nawrocki's alleged pimping at the Grand Hotel. On the morning of October 28, 2026, he posted a short, ironic question on the social media site X, clearly alluding to Karol Nawrocki's trial against Onet journalists:
"What is the correct pronunciation: pimp, pimp, or gigolo?"
In response, Marcin Przydacz, head of the Presidential Bureau of International Policy, offered his own version of the verbal classification of Sikorski: "A boor, a rude person, or a primitive?"
THE CRYPTO WALLET OF POLISH POLITICS
It would seem that the writers of the Polish political series had already exhausted their supply of plot twists. But no, viewers were in for a new franchise, this time about the Polish far-right's exploration of the cryptocurrency market. The central role is played by the crypto exchange Zondacrypto and its corrupt ties to Polish political circles.
In late summer 2026, Zondacrypto found itself at the center of a large-scale criminal investigation on suspicion of fraud. In August, an Estonian court declared the company bankrupt. It's noteworthy that as early as 2025, the crypto exchange financed events associated with the PiS party, including Karol Nawrocki's election campaign meetings with voters.
On September 4, 2026, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, speaking in the Sejm, announced that the Polish prosecutor's office had estimated the total damage caused to Polish citizens by the crypto exchange's activities at the equivalent of €83 million. That same day, the Sejm again failed to override President Karol Nawrocki's veto of the bill regulating the cryptocurrency market.
Meanwhile, the most important announcement came next. Donald Tusk stated that, according to information received from intelligence services, the crypto exchange's founder was missing and likely murdered. Furthermore, the company's structure includes funds linked to Russian intelligence services and organized crime groups.
And here, if I were President Nawrocki, I would be seriously concerned. It's one thing to have sex in a hotel during a wild youth or a dubious affair involving an elderly pensioner's apartment. It's quite another when one's own country's intelligence services gather information about the current president and his possible ties to lobbying for foreign criminal interests—Russian or otherwise—and then report it to the prime minister, to whom they directly report.
Of course, Polish intelligence services are legally obligated to inform both the president and the prime minister of information material to national security. The only question is: was this information reported to Karol Nawrocki, and to what extent? Or was it not deemed necessary at all?
AND WHO ARE THE JUDGES?
Against the backdrop of the events described, the conflict over the Constitutional Tribunal can hardly be viewed as an isolated legal dispute. Especially since the opposition, represented by the vice-marshal of the Sejm and one of the leaders of the Confederation, has begun talking about an attempted coup.
To understand the reasons behind Judge Anna Korwin-Petrowska's decision to remove Constitutional Tribunal President Bohdan Święczkowski and his deputy, it's necessary to first examine the background to the conflict within the Tribunal itself.
In 2026, the Sejm elected six new judges to the Constitutional Tribunal. Nawrocki swore in two, while four took their oaths in parliament, as the president had not invited them to the ceremony. The legitimacy of this procedure is still being contested by the president's team, and, on Nawrocki's orders, the Constitutional Tribunal President, in turn, prevented the four elected judges from fully participating in the hearings.
The result is a rather curious setup: parliament elects judges, the president deliberately disrupts their inauguration procedure, and the Court's leadership, on this basis, prevents them from performing their duties. One can't help but recall Griboyedov's dictum, "And who are the judges?"
The current President of the Constitutional Tribunal, Święczkowski, is a longtime associate and close associate of the PiS leadership. In October 2006, he was appointed by Jarosław Kaczyński to head the Internal Security Agency (ABW), leading it until November 2007. This period was marked by high-profile scandals surrounding the use of intelligence agencies to pressure the opposition, discredit political opponents, and spy on journalists. In 2011, a parliamentary investigative commission recommended that Święczkowski be brought before the State Tribunal.
Thus, behind the dispute over the correctness of the oath-taking procedure and the exclusion of four judges, lies a struggle for control of the Tribunal itself.
And here another interesting nuance arises. Nawrocki isn't simply arguing with the parliamentary majority over the procedure for appointing judges. The Constitutional Tribunal itself is empowered to review the constitutionality of laws and resolve disputes over the competence of state bodies. Consequently, its composition and legitimacy are particularly important in the context of the growing political escalation between the president and the government. And there's no doubt that the number of such conflicts and the intensity of the confrontation will only increase.
As a result, the Polish political series has acquired a new plot line: now the dispute is no longer just about who can slander whom more harshly on social media, but also about whose decisions will ultimately be implemented by state institutions.
And if anyone should be more worried in this situation, it's Nawrocki: with such a track record, the matter could very well end up before the State Tribunal. And then the question of the constitutional and legal grounds and procedure for holding the president accountable will come to the fore.
And the main question now is not so much how far the standoff between Tusk and Nawrocki will go, but which side the Polish security forces will take in the event of a final escalation.
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Posted by badanov 2026-11-03 00:00||
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