Large crowds protest against Poland’s ruling conservative party

Hundreds of thousands of people marched through Warsaw on Sunday in a huge demonstration of opposition to the governing party ahead of October’s general election, recalling Poland’s rejection of Communist Party rule decades earlier.

Organized by the government’s political rivals, the event aimed to deprive Poland’s ultra-conservative Law and Justice party of its claims to the legacy of Solidarity, the trade union movement that led the struggle against a post-World War II communist system. imposed by Moscow.

Large protests also took place in Krakow, Szczecin and other major cities controlled by the opposition party, which is strong in urban areas but struggles in rural areas.

Law and Justice, which regularly smears its enemies as communists and Russian agents, recently pushed legislation through parliament to create a commission to investigate Russian influence and bar individuals from public office for up to 10 years if found guilty. succumbed to it.

The opposition denounced the move as a ploy to cover politicians critical of the ruling party with Russia’s slur and disqualify them from participating in October. The United States and the European Union expressed concern about the law, commonly known as “Lex Tusk”, because one of the targets is expected to be Donald Tusk, the main leader of the opposition party.

In a speech to protesters in Warsaw’s Old Town on Sunday Mr Tusk, the leader of the Civic Platform, accused Law and Justice of rolling back democracy and turning Poland away from Europe, comparing the upcoming elections to the June 4, 1989 vote – the first free elections of the country since 1945 – it gave a victory to Solidarity and sealed the end of communist rule.

“The slogan of Solidarity was ‘we will not be divided or destroyed,'” Tusk said, adding that “the great hope” of the enemies of democracy past and present “was our hopelessness, their strength was our powerlessness.”

Referring to the opening line of the Polish national anthem, he added: “It’s over. Today, all of us in Poland, we all see, we all hear ‘Poland has not yet perished’, we are going to victory.”

Other speakers included Lech Walesa, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Solidarity leader who, after the collapse of communism, became Poland’s first freely elected post-war president, only to be denounced by Law and Justice as a communist-era secret police agent. .

The Warsaw City Hall, which is controlled by political enemies of the government, estimated the turnout at half a million. That was almost certainly an exaggeration, but despite the high numbers, Sunday’s march appeared to be the largest anti-government demonstration since the 1980s street protests in support of Solidarity.

TVP Info, a state-controlled news channel, reported that at most 100,000 people had taken part and focused its minimal coverage of the march on obscenities uttered by some protesters, a tactic often used by pro-government news outlets to throw critics off the law to paint. and justice as foul-mouthed infidels who oppose the Roman Catholic Church.

As large crowds gathered on Sunday afternoon, TVP Info led its news bulletin with a report on the ‘National Parade of Farmers House Women’s Circles’, a modestly attended event organized by the Ministry of Agriculture.

Law and Justice, in power since 2015, has a major advantage in this year’s parliamentary elections due to tight control over state television and radio and the backing of a large battery of nominally independent outlets that rely on government funding . Most polls predict it will win more seats than Civic Platform, but it will fail to win a majority and could struggle to form a stable government.