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Austria Now News – Vienna
Freedom Party (FPÖ) leader Herbert Kickl has described the measures taken against the leadership of Poland’s Constitutional Court as a clear attempted coup – his second sharp statement this week, after he criticised the Halloween night riots in Europe.
Crisis in Warsaw
On Friday evening, the website of the Polish Constitutional Court published a notice that court president Bogdan Święczkowski and his deputy had been removed from office. The court’s account on the platform X, however, denied this, saying the website had been unlawfully taken over and that Święczkowski remained president. Since then, the political crisis in Warsaw has been escalating.
In a joint statement with MEP Petra Steger, Kickl accused Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk of seeking to bring the court under his control with the help of the police, while Steger criticised what she called double standards on the part of the European institutions.
On the other hand, serious questions have been raised for around eleven years about the independence of the Polish Constitutional Court, which was gradually politicised under the former PiS government, with judges appointed under controversial circumstances, some of them former MPs of the party, according to the newspaper Heute.
His stance on the Halloween riots
Earlier on Sunday, Kickl had commented on Facebook on the riots that took place in cities in Germany and France on Halloween night, describing them as bordering on a frenzy of destruction. He blamed extremist groups which he said came from migrant milieus, as well as far-left activists, and saw this as the result of policies that had ignored these developments for years, calling for a fundamental change of the political system.
According to reports, Halloween night in Austria passed relatively calmly compared with cities such as Frankfurt, Cologne and Paris, where police were pelted with stones and firecrackers and there were attempted lootings.
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Photo: Wistula / Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0
Sources
- Heute – Astreiner Putschversuch – FPÖ-Chef Kickl ist entsetzt – 01.11.2026 – https://www.heute.at/s/astreiner-putschversuch-fpoe-chef-kickl-ist-entsetzt-120275259
- Heute – Halloween-Exzesse in Europa – Kickl platzt der Kragen – 01.11.2026 – https://www.heute.at/s/halloween-exzesse-in-europa-kickl-platzt-der-kragen-120275184
