Warsaw
Hundreds of thousands demonstrate against Polish PiS government: “Democracy is dying quietly”
Watch the video: Hundreds of thousands demonstrate in Warsaw against the Polish PiS government.
According to observers, it was one of the largest demonstrations ever seen in Poland. Hundreds of thousands of people protested against the conservative PiS government in Warsaw on Sunday. To mark the 34th anniversary of Poland’s first post-war democratic elections, government critics from across the country traveled to the capital in hundreds of buses. The downtown crowd formed a line more than a mile long. Demonstrators waved Polish and European flags. Among other things, the planned law to prevent undue Russian influence was criticized at the rally. The opposition sees the draft as an attempt by the government to launch a witch hunt on political opponents. The attacks by the ruling party PiS on the pillars of democracy would not be tacitly accepted, said Donald Tusk at the demonstration. The EU had criticized that the law could bar candidates from public office without proper judicial review. For years, the PiS government has been at odds with the European Union, among other things, over allegations of undermining the independence of the judiciary in the country.
More than 100,000 people are protesting in Warsaw against the policies of the national-conservative government. They fear that the PiS, which has been in power since 2015, could prevent a democratic change of power in the fall elections. A new law is fueling fears.
Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in Warsaw on Sunday against Poland’s national conservative government. The organizers spoke of the largest demonstration since the end of communism in 1989. According to the city administration, around half a million people took part in the rally organized by the opposition. Opposition politician and former EU Council President Donald Tusk warned that democracy in Poland was dying. Participants waved Polish flags and the flag of the EU, as well as placards reading “Enough is enough” and “No to an authoritarian Poland”. The former Polish trade union leader, president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa marched at the head of the march.
Opposition to Donald Tusk versus PiS government
The largest opposition party, Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO), called for the demonstration. Other opposition parties had also asked their members to join the march against Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s right-wing governing party PiS. The participants came from all over the country, smaller rallies also took place in other cities. Addressing demonstrators in Warsaw’s Old Town, Tusk said the role of the opposition is now “of comparable importance” to that in the 1980s protests against communism. “Democracy is dying quietly. From today on, it won’t be quiet anymore,” Tusk said. “May democracy not die – despite the daily attacks by Kaczynski’s PiS on its pillars.”
Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa supports protests
Walesa, who became Poland’s first democratically elected president in 1990, told the demonstrators that he had been “patiently waiting” for the day when Kaczynski and his party would be expelled. “The day has finally come,” said Walesa. Protest participant Piotr Mroz, a 62-year-old construction worker, told the AFP news agency: “If that doesn’t change now, we will soon have conditions like in Hungary and Turkey.” “They want to make Poland a country similar to Russia,” warned 22-year-old student Karolina Sieminska. At the end of May, Polish President Andrzej Duda approved the establishment of a controversial commission of inquiry into “Russian influence” in the country. The nine-member panel is to judge whether people succumbed to Russian influence between 2007 and 2022 – without the judiciary being involved in such investigations.
Watch the video: Poland renames Kaliningrad – Russian residents scoff at the move.
Critics: Massive attack on the rule of law
If convicted by the Commission, those affected face a ten-year ban from public office and access to state funds. Critics see the commission as a massive attack on the rule of law and also as an attempt by the PiS to discredit Tusk, who served as head of government from 2007 to 2014, before the parliamentary elections in autumn. A new parliament will be elected in Poland in the autumn. Polls indicate that the PiS party will win the election with around 30 percent of the vote, but will miss the majority. This could represent an opportunity for the opposition. The demonstration took place on the 34th anniversary of the first partially free elections in Poland on June 4, 1989. In the months that followed, the Iron Curtain fell in Europe.