Starting Friday night, Prime Minister Donald Tusk staged a forced takeover of one of the country's top courts, prompting Polish President Karol Nawrocki to abrubtly turn back his plane which was ‌en route to Africa for a scheduled state visit.

"At a moment like this, the President must be in Poland. I am ‌cutting short ?my flight to Senegal. I am returning," he wrote on ?X. The globe's attention then turned to Warsaw and site of the Constitutional ‌Tribunal, where police had surrounded it, and prevented the independent body's leaders from entering its grounds.

Protesters also soon descended, after it was revealed that the court's longest-serving judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska had suspended Bogdan Swieczkowski, the tribunal's president. The country's main anti-Tusk opposition decried the blatant judicial power-grab.

President Nawrocki, an ally of the previous nationalist and Right-wing government is now in a desperate battle against Tusk's pro-EU government for ultimate control of the judiciary.

Tusk's ruling coalition has been trying for weeks to remove judges appointed under the previous PiS government, and now the trigger has been pulled in the most obvious of ways - with the clash literally spilling into the streets amid a stand off with police. 

After disembarking his plane upon his abrupt return to Warsaw Friday night, President Nawrocki physically attempted to gain entry amid unpredented displays of scuffles breaking out at the top court: