Analysis: Europe — 03 November 2026
Tusk-aligned judges suspend Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal president as Nawrocki forces entry
On the evening of 30 October, a judge close to Donald Tusk’s government, acting on instructions from Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek, suspended Constitutional Tribunal president Bogdan Święczkowski and vice-president Bartłomiej Sochański and claimed control of the court. Riot police sealed the Warsaw building. President Karol Nawrocki aborted a trip to Senegal, turned his aircraft around and forced his way in overnight, calling the episode a forcible takeover of a constitutional body. Tusk said there could be “no compromise” on reforming a court he describes as a PiS creation, not a genuine court. The European Commission has sided with parliament’s power to appoint judges. The episode stands out because a sitting president physically confronted a judicial takeover, on camera, inside an EU member state.
The conflict is a decade old. After 2015, Law and Justice voided Civic Platform appointments and restocked the tribunal. The EU Court of Justice ruled in December 2025 that the court failed independence tests because of those irregularities. Tusk returned in 2023 pledging to restore rule of law, but Nawrocki, elected in 2025 with PiS backing, has refused to swear in eight judges chosen by the current Sejm. Święczkowski blocked them from the building. Tusk-backed judges plan a Tuesday session on the budget and disciplinary cases; they need a quorum of ten of fifteen members.
Fact and interpretation diverge sharply. Tusk presents force as the only remaining legal path; Nawrocki and PiS call it a coup. Liberal scholar Marcin Matczak has said there is no legal basis for the suspensions. The street protest drew Jarosław Kaczyński together with Confederation and other right-wing figures who had previously kept their distance. Analysis: the crisis is already functioning as a pre-campaign for 2027, testing whether Tusk’s coalition can hold and whether Brussels’s backing of the government against a directly elected president will be read as restoration of legality or as EU law overriding national constitutional procedure.
Sources: UnHerd, Spiked, Politico Europe.
Sánchez calls Spanish snap election as Toledo rail crash exposes underinvestment
Pedro Sánchez brought forward Spain’s election to 29 November after a housing crisis that included the televised eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal, who later died. Campaigning then stopped when a high-speed collision near Toledo killed at least 69 people. The government first blamed human error. Leaked control-centre recordings pointed instead to a failed movement-and-speed supervision system, outdated GSM-R communications and voltage drops. The crash stands out because it recast a welfare-and-housing campaign as a test of whether the state has funded basic infrastructure.
Wolfgang Münchau’s account treats Spain as a local case of a wider western European pattern: welfare commitments that outrun revenue, thin public investment, weak productivity and heavy borrowing. Sánchez, eight years in office, is one of the last recognisable old-school socialists in the European Council and has picked public fights with Washington and Israel while Spain has lagged NATO spending targets. France has let rail investment dry up under Macron; German trains, once a byword for punctuality, are now among Europe’s least reliable.
The open question is whether the accident will work as the 2004 Atocha bombings did, when a government’s first account of a disaster destroyed trust. Sánchez is a high-stakes gambler in the Gerhard Schröder mould; his earlier unexpected survival may not repeat. If he loses, the verdict will rest less on campaign skill than on neglected railways, housing shortages and a defence posture at odds with his foreign-policy rhetoric. Similar gaps in transport investment now run through several large EU economies.
Sources: UnHerd.