President Karol Nawrocki went into Poland's Constitutional Tribunal in the middle of the night on Saturday and told the judges who had taken control of it hours earlier that they were not judges. "You are not judges of the Constitutional Tribunal, and you are taking over this building illegally," he told Anna Korwin-Piotrowska and two of her colleagues, in a recording published by Onet overnight.

The Polish President had turned his plane round on the way to Senegal on Friday evening, met the head of the Supreme Court, Zbigniew Kapiński, at the Presidential Palace, and then gone to the tribunal with Kapiński, his aides and his State Protection Service officers, walking past the police cordon to the door. He left a little before five in the morning.

Maciej Berek, one of the judges inside, whom Donald Tusk has called his "right-hand man", posted video and wrote that the judges had waited at a side entrance and that Korwin-Piotrowska stood at the door to greet the president and invite him to a room they had prepared. "To use the gentlest words, the president crashed into Judge Korwin-Piotrowska," Berek wrote, "and began to push his way through the group of other judges."

He said nobody laid a hand on the president, that Nawrocki did not speak to the judges waiting for him but went upstairs with his aides, and that the aides tried to take the keys to the building's rooms. The president's spokesman, Rafał Leśkiewicz, said the judges blocking the entrance had violated the president's personal inviolability and that Berek's post had "documented a crime". On the recording the head of Nawrocki's chancellery, Zbigniew Bogucki, tells the judges they have "no legal grounds either to be here or to issue these ridiculous orders".