Hundreds of thousands of Poles marched through Warsaw to celebrate the country’s Independence Day on Wednesday, 11 November, with city authorities estimating around 250,000 participants—a 150 per cent increase from last year—in an extraordinary show of strength by Poland’s right-wing opposition, mobilized mainly by Donald Tusk’s attempted takeover of the Constitutional Tribunal.
Organizers of the so-called Independence March put the crowd even higher, at 500,000, with some later estimates suggesting as many as one million. Leading the march was President Karol Nawrocki, with representatives of virtually every major political force to the right of Tusk’s governing coalition present: Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS), Konfederacja, Grzegorz Braun’s Konfederacja Korony Polskiej (KKP) and former prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s newly established Rozwój Plus movement were all represented.
These are also the parties whose cooperation, in one form or another, would be necessary to form an alternative capable of defeating the Tusk-led coalition in the 2027 parliamentary election.
The annual march came less than two weeks after judges aligned with and appointed by Tusk’s parliamentary majority moved to oust the Constitutional Tribunal’s leadership, turning the constitutional crisis into a potential rallying point for the fractured right.
Konfederacja leader Krzysztof Bosak addressed precisely the need to exploit this momentum and turn it against the government itself. ‘This is the last year, the last full year of this government, which is leading Poland in the wrong direction,’ he declared, once again condemning the scenes at the Constitutional Tribunal. Calling for patriots to unite in 2027, Bosak said the goal must be a ‘pro-Polish government’ and urged the building of bridges between rival political camps.
PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński went even further, stating that his party would work towards ‘one great list’ for the next election. Speaking to Onet during the Independence March, he said such a list would not merely be for the Senate but for the more consequential Sejm. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that, for this to happen, the three leaders of the different Konfederacja factions and KKP—Bosak, Mentzen and Braun—would need to be persuaded.
That might be harder than it first appears. During the march, Mentzen, who is probably the most popular of them on social media and among younger voters, posed beside a banner bearing the word ‘Reset’, featuring both Tusk and Kaczyński crossed out. Konfederacja itself was launched in the 2010s as a socially conservative, economically liberal anti-establishment party appealing to voters disillusioned with both major camps and Poland’s politics of division.
In an interview with Hungarian Conservative in 2025, Bosak also spoke cautiously about a potential coalition with PiS, describing the party as a ‘difficult coalition partner’. He nevertheless added that Konfederacja was open to talks and would remain assertive and independent if negotiations took place.
Morawiecki’s Rozwój Plus, which recently split from PiS specifically over Kaczyński’s intention to cooperate with KKP, continues to reject any electoral alliance with Braun. For now, the emerging convergence therefore looks more like the possibility of a loose anti-Tusk front than a settled coalition, although the persistence of the constitutional crisis could strengthen it significantly.
Earlier, at the official Independence Day ceremony in Warsaw, Nawrocki directly addressed the situation. ‘A free nation deserves a free Constitutional Tribunal, free from police cordons, but also free from politicians,’ he declared, accusing the recent takeover of burying the court’s prestige. Tusk, who attended a separate event in Szczecin instead of commemorating alongside the president in Warsaw, responded by accusing Nawrocki of dividing Poles rather than uniting them. ‘What a shame,’ he wrote on X.
The constitutional showdown remains far from over. Tribunal president Bogdan Święczkowski, who also attended the march and whose suspension the Supreme Court overturned on Tuesday, announced that he would attempt to re-enter the police-guarded court on Thursday, presenting the ruling to officers and potentially seeking a bailiff’s assistance.
Meanwhile, Tusk-aligned judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska has convened a 17 November assembly to consider Justice Minister and Prosecutor General Waldemar Żurek’s requests to strip Święczkowski of his judicial immunity and authorize his detention and pre-trial arrest.