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Braving Poland’s harsh winter temperatures, tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Warsaw in the largest anti-government demonstration since Prime Minister Donald Tusk took office a month ago.
The protest was headed by Tusk’s longtime rival Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the outgoing Law and Justice (PiS) party that is now trying to stop the premier from pushing through reforms and dismantling the state apparatus that PiS built in its previous eight years in power.
Kaczyński told demonstrators — about 35,000 according to early estimates by Warsaw city hall — that Tusk’s coalition government was “breaking the rule of law” and “violating the constitution”. He added: “They intend to destroy or take over all the institutions and ultimately destroy the office of the president — and we cannot allow this.”
President Andrzej Duda, a PiS nominee, has been fighting this week for the release of two opposition lawmakers who were convicted for abusing power. Duda is arguing that their arrest was unconstitutional because he had already pardoned them in 2015. On Thursday he announced that he would grant them a fresh pardon to secure their freedom.
Duda said on Thursday that the two jailed MPs, who were taken into custody while they were visiting him at the presidential palace, were the first political prisoners in Poland since the collapse of the Communist regime. He called on the prosecutor-general to order their immediate release and warned that their imprisonment “insults our international position.”
The protest outside parliament started hours after the constitutional court ruled that lawmakers from Tusk’s coalition parties could not put on trial the governor of the central bank, Adam Glapiński. Tusk has accused him of turning monetary policy into a PiS political instrument. Glapiński, who is a personal friend of Kaczyński, is serving a second term that ends in 2026.
Named by PiS as “the protest of free Poles”, Thursday’s rally was seen as an important test for the opposition’s ability to mobilise voters, particularly ahead of local elections in April and European parliament elections in June in which PiS is hoping to rebound after losing office last year.
“The coalition is violating the constitution, they do not care about anyone,” said Roman Lewandowski, 72, who travelled four hours to Warsaw from Swarzędz in western Poland on a bus organised by PiS to join the protest. “We will press Tusk to act in accordance with the law.”
Participation to the PiS rally still pales in comparison with the hundreds of thousands of people who showed up in support of Tusk when he was leader of the opposition and in the run-up to last October’s elections, which had a record turnout in Poland’s recent history.
Since taking office in mid-December, Tusk has faced a fierce backlash that also relies on PiS trying to turn the tables on him over Poland’s rule of law. During its eight years in power PiS itself was accused by Brussels and Tusk of eroding the rule of law. The European Commission froze billions of EU funds to force the PiS government to restore the independence of judges.
When Tusk visited Brussels last month, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen told him to “rest assured that the commission stands by your side”.
But von der Leyen is under pressure to show that the Polish government is taking steps to restore the independence of the judiciary before releasing the country’s frozen funds — a challenging prospect given Duda’s veto powers.
PiS has seized upon this Catch-22 situation to insist that Brussels should be strict with Tusk and not allow him to override Polish legislation to fast track his reforms.
“The biggest challenge for Tusk is how to fix the rule of law without violating the law himself and I think that this is also a challenge for the European Commission,” said Piotr Bogdanowicz, a professor of EU law at Warsaw university.
The EU’s justice commissioner Didier Reynders is set to visit Warsaw next week to start negotiations over how to unlock more of the EU funds, after Tusk secured last month the release of €5bn. “We need something that doesn’t require presidential approval but that is as binding as possible,” said one EU official.
Additional reporting by Paola Tamma in Brussels
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