Poland Mini-Coup: Police Enter Presidential Palace to Arrest Former Government Ministers

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk is speaking during a press conference after a government
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Oliver JJ Lane

Police entered the Presidential Palace of Poland to arrest politicians of the recently dethroned right-wing government, after a fresh ruling by a court friendly to the new government.

Former Polish Home Affairs Minister Mariusz Kamiński and deputy Maciej Wąsik were arrested by police on Tuesday, apparently part of a push to tie up loose ends by the newly installed globalist-centrist Donald Tusk government. The pair were taken by officers at the Presidential Palace after President Andrej Duda himself had left the building to attend a meeting.

Duda has expressed his outrage at the “brutal” arrest of politicians at the official building, saying “I won’t rest until Minister Mariusz Kamiński and his colleagues are free people again, as they should be, until they are released from prison”. The President says the arrests were illegal.

Poland’s recently unseated Prime Minister Mateusz Morawicki also spoke out against the arrests, praising his country’s post-Cold War achievements of ending political persecution, saying in the 35 years since the end of the Soviet Union “no one was persecuted in our country because of their political views, and no political prisoners were held”. This has now changed, he said, continuing: “For the first time since the dark days of totalitarian rule we have political prisoners in Poland. They are the former Interior Minister Mariusz Kamiński and deputy Maciej Wąsik.

“Both are members of the Polish Parliament. Both fought against communists. Both fought for justice in a free Poland… unfortunately, both are victims of political revenge, targeted by Donald Tusk’s government.”

Morawicki said the arrests were a “flagrant” breach of Polish law and the Constitution and was an abuse of power by the new government. He said: “and this is happening in a major European Union country in the 21st century… this is a source of great shame”.

Minister Mariusz Kamiński, who was an anti-communist activist during the Soviet era and a Parliamentarian since the 1990s was dismissed from government and charged with abuse of power during the last Donald Tusk government in 2010 over the Polish Land scandal that had brought down the previous government. Kamiński and Wąsik denied the charges but were eventually convicted five years later, however the ruling was immediately annulled by President Andrzej Duda, who pardoned the pair and two others.

Whether this pardon was legally permissible has gone back and forth between different courts with different allegiances. A fresh ruling found them guilty again last week and arrest warrants were issued, yet even that was quickly followed by another court finding stripping the Parliamentarians of their protections was unlawful. The second ruling, and another finding the first court doesn’t have the power to overturn Presidential pardons anyway, seem to have been ignored.

Coincidentally, that ruling for arrest came the same day in December 2023 as Polish police entered the Warsaw television studio of TVP and the channel went off the air, one of the more remarkable events of the new Tusk government so far.

Kamiński and Maciej Wąsik were arrested at the Presidential Palace, where their PIS ally Andrej Duda is still the head of state, and where they had travelled for protection. Kamiński, who had been a political prisoner in the Communist era, compared the order to arrest him to that time in a communication published before his arrest, stating that despite a ruling he remained a member of parliament and that he intended to fight and remain a free man. He is reportedly now on hunger strike.

Politico reports a Justice minister in the new Polish government responded “Of course, everyone has the right not to eat or drink”.

Former Eurocrat and globalist-centrist Donald Tusk may not have won enough votes on his platform of restoring “rule of law to have won last year’s national elections, but he was able to build a coalition with two small parties after the fact to form a new government and eject the right-conservative Law and Justice (PIS) Party from office.

PIS lawmakers and supporters attempted to delay the arrival of the new government and since its installation have questioned some of the methods of Tusk, who warned before the election that he’d only need hours to remake Poland after winning. Indeed, the country is now showing some signs of being in the process of a so-called self-coup, defined as an otherwise democratically elected government taking extraordinary steps to cement its power. Shadows of this emerged quickly after Andrej Duda’s return to power in recent weeks, with media organisations having their leadership summarily dismissed by the new government, and police even being deployed to the headquarters of a major television station as it was taken off air.

Indeed, as noted by Politico, the rush to take control of all institutions after regaining control of the government has been “criticized for bending or even breaking the law”.

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