At around six on Friday evening, a notice appeared on the website of Poland's Constitutional Tribunal. The court's president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and his deputy were suspended for a month. The tribunal would now be run by Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, who said she qualified as the longest-serving judge, counting her service, according to the text of her order published by prawo.pl, from the day she began judicial training in September 1995.

Shortly afterwards the tribunal's own account on X denied the whole thing and called it a "coup d'état". By late evening riot police were holding the grounds. Shortly before one in the morning, the President of the Republic pushed his way through the cordon and into the building, telling the judges in front of him that they "were not judges of the constitutional court".

So that is how Poland spent Friday night: two rival sets of judges, one building, and a head of state who had turned his plane around on the way to Senegal.

Nobody here is innocent

Start with the uncomfortable part for the right. The tribunal Święczkowski runs is not a clean institution being bullied by a wicked government. Law and Justice (PiS) packed it after 2015. The European Court of Human Rights and the EU Court of Justice both found that three of its judges had been elected to seats that were already validly filled, the BBC notes. Even the Commission's dry rule-of-law report this year speaks of "serious concerns" about the tribunal. Święczkowski himself is a former PiS minister.

And PiS has kept the fight going from the presidency. Karol Nawrocki refused to swear in five judges elected by the current parliament. They took their oath in the Sejm instead, and Święczkowski would not let them hear cases. Earlier this month the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe's legal advisers, said the president's refusal should not keep them off the bench. Korwin-Piotrowska is one of those five.

So Donald Tusk has a real grievance. "Restoring the rule of law is our duty," he wrote on Friday. "There is no other way."

There was another way. It just would have been slower.

The clause

Look at what the order actually rests on. Not the constitution, and not the law on the tribunal. It cites Article 130 of Poland's law on the ordinary courts, reached through two other statutes that say gaps should be filled with rules for other judges.

Article 130 is an emergency brake. It allows a court president or the justice minister to remove a judge from duty immediately when the judge has been caught in the act of committing a deliberate crime, or when the nature of what the judge has done means the dignity of the court requires it. It lasts at most a month, and a disciplinary court must then review it. When the judge in question is a court president, the law says only the minister can pull the brake.

Marcin Matczak, a law professor who has spent years attacking the PiS reforms, read it the obvious way. On this basis, he wrote, it is in effect the justice minister who has suspended the president of the Constitutional Tribunal. Judges of that tribunal answer only to the constitution. The legal basis, he wrote, was non-existent "for a million reasons", and he added that he never thought he would end up defending Święczkowski. His verdict: Friday's action "buries this body and the issue of the rule of law for two decades".

That is not a PiS talking point. That is one of Tusk's own natural allies.

The government says it had nothing to do with it

Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek insists this was a decision by a lawfully elected judge and that the government played no part. Yet on the same day Żurek, who is also prosecutor general, filed requests to strip Święczkowski and his deputy of immunity so they can be prosecuted for obstructing the court, Politico reports. "And now the judges have spoken," he said.

Police say they came at a judge's request, after warnings of threats to judges and staff, and did not enter the building. The video of Nawrocki forcing his way in was posted by Maciej Berek, who served as a minister in Tusk's cabinet and whom the majority put forward for the tribunal in September. The foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, said it was all about letting "duly elected judges" make the tribunal work again.

Maybe. But when the people restoring judicial independence include the prosecutor general, a former cabinet minister and a clause written for judges caught red-handed, the word independence is doing a lot of work.

Brussels' turn to be consistent

For eight years the EU lectured Warsaw that the rule of law is about procedure, not about which side wins. It was right. You do not fix a captured court by capturing it back. You fix it with rules that the other side would accept if it were in your place.

We could find no Commission statement on Friday's events by Saturday morning. If Brussels now stays quiet because the right people are in charge in Warsaw, it confirms the suspicion PiS voters have nursed for a decade: that the rule-of-law campaign was never about law.

Poland votes next year, and polls suggest the populist right could come back. If it does, it will inherit a precedent: a tribunal president removed overnight with a borrowed clause and police at the gate. Korwin-Piotrowska has called the full court to meet on 3 November. The better outcome would be a deal, swearing in the five and settling the improperly elected seats through a constitutional procedure both camps can live with, not through Article 130. Nawrocki should be part of that deal, not its victim or its bouncer.

The rule of law is not something one side wins. It is the way you are supposed to fight.