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Poland is in the middle of a full-blown constitutional crisis after the country’s top court suspended its chief justice Friday, prompting President Karol Nawrocki to turn his plane around and force his way into the court building in the middle of the night.

Getting into it: Late Friday, the court’s most senior judge suspended its president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and his deputy, both appointed under the former Law and Justice party government, and put herself in charge, the Constitutional Tribunal said. Święczkowski had refused to seat judges chosen by Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s parliamentary majority, including Tusk ally Maciej Berek, who was kept off the bench last week after scuffles broke out in front of the court.

Riot police surrounded the building in Warsaw as hundreds of protesters gathered calling for Święczkowski to be reinstated. Nawrocki, a Law and Justice ally backed by President Trump, turned back his flight to Senegal and arrived at the court just after midnight, where video showed him pushing past a group of judges trying to keep him out. He held talks with political parties on Saturday, but there was no breakthrough.

The fight over the court goes back to 2015, when Law and Justice began filling seats that had already been assigned by the previous government. In 2021, the European Union’s top court found the tribunal lacked independence, and the EU froze billions in funding to Poland over its judiciary. Tusk came to power in 2023 promising to fix it, but Nawrocki has refused to swear in judges approved by parliament, and Tusk’s government has refused to publish the court’s rulings.

The European Commission urged Nawrocki on Saturday to accept the new judges. But the shakeup has drawn criticism even from some of Tusk’s supporters, with the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights calling its legal basis “questionable” and others saying Berek’s appointment undercuts Tusk’s promise to take politics out of the court. Conservatives in the European Parliament accused Tusk of attacking judicial independence, and an aide to Nawrocki called Tusk “a pathological liar, who is setting Poland ablaze.”

This all comes ahead of next year’s parliamentary election, with polls showing Tusk’s coalition and the nationalist right running neck and neck. The US ambassador to Poland has urged everyone involved to avoid any moves that could lead to violence.