Zbigniew Bogucki, head of the president’s chancellery, said Karol Nawrocki held talks with the government on ensuring that every president of Poland has a separate guard answerable only to him. He added that the president has no complaint against the State Protection Service (SOP) over the events at the Constitutional Tribunal (TK), and that it was his decision to go into the Tribunal’s headquarters first.
In an interview with Telewizja Republika, Bogucki returned to the events of Friday, when President Karol Nawrocki cut short a trip to Senegal because of the conflict surrounding the Constitutional Tribunal and went to the Tribunal’s headquarters.
The head of the president’s chancellery confirmed reports in the daily Rzeczpospolita that, on entering the Tribunal grounds, the president told State Protection Service officers: “I’m going in first, you follow me.”
– Yes, the president wanted to go first, deciding that he would enter the Tribunal because there is no host there, because the hosts were the [Tribunal] president, the vice president and the lawful judges, Bogucki said. Asked whether the president has any complaint against his protection detail, he replied that he does not, because it was the president’s decision.
Bogucki also said that Karol Nawrocki had at one point held talks with the government on ensuring that every president of Poland, regardless of who holds the office, has his own presidential guard answerable solely to him.
Asked about a possible date for a conversation between Prime Minister Donald Tusk and the president, Bogucki said there is no date yet, but that it is a matter of the next few days.
The conflict over the Tribunal escalated on Friday after representatives of the group elected as TK judges by the current term of the Sejm, Poland’s lower house of parliament, announced that Anna Korwin-Piotrowska had become head of the Constitutional Tribunal and had issued an order for a break in the duties of Tribunal President Bogdan Święczkowski and Vice President Bartłomiej Sochański.
The president cut short his trip to Senegal and returned to Warsaw. He met, among others, with First President of the Supreme Court Zbigniew Kapiński, and then went to the Tribunal’s headquarters.
Early Saturday, the president issued a statement saying that “the constitutional order of the Republic of Poland was violated and a constitutional organ of the state was taken over by force.”
On Saturday evening, Prime Minister Tusk delivered an address in which he said, among other things, that “the attack on the Constitutional Tribunal and its judges is another stage in the process of destroying the rule of law in Poland by PiS and Presidents Andrzej Duda and Karol Nawrocki,” and that “the state must be strong and capable of enforcing justice.”
The situation at the Tribunal was raised at Tuesday’s National Security Council (RBN) meeting, which was initially supposed to be devoted to the issue of the American base in Poland. During the public part of the RBN meeting, President Karol Nawrocki said that the situation at the Constitutional Tribunal had led to a serious constitutional crisis. After the RBN meeting, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said he had proposed to the president a one-on-one meeting this week on lowering tensions. (PAP)
