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Polish Opposition Proposes ‘Tribunal’ Against President, PM Amid Bitter Election Battle

© AFP 2023 / MANDEL NGANPolish President Andrzej Duda (4thR) and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki (4thL) attend a bilateral meeting with the US President at the Presidential Palace in Warsaw on February 21, 2023. File photo.
Polish President Andrzej Duda (4thR) and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki (4thL) attend a bilateral meeting with the US President at the Presidential Palace in Warsaw on February 21, 2023. File photo. - Sputnik International, 1920, 10.09.2023
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Poland’s long-running constitutional crisis, which began in 2015 after the ruling Law and Justice Party moved to consolidate government control over the courts, has been exacerbated by the proxy war in Ukraine, with the governing coalition recently passing a “Russian influence” law which critics say is designed to target the opposition.
Poland’s largest opposition party has promised to convene special tribunals to investigate senior officials from the government and Central Bank charged with corruption, illegal surveillance, economic mismanagement, excessive deficit spending (including for a massive rearmament campaign), an illegal stranglehold over the courts and state television, and the subversion of democratic norms.
“Put [President] Andrzej Duda, [Prime Minister] Mateusz Morawiecki, [Minister of State Assets] Jacek Sasin, [Minister of Justice and Prosecutor General] Zbigniew Ziobro, [National Bank chief] Adam Glapinski, [National Council for Television and Radio Broadcasting chief] Maciej Swirski and [Minister of Culture and National Heritage] Piotr Glinski before a state tribunal,” the opposition Civic Platform party said in a campaign program released Saturday ahead of the upcoming October 15 parliamentary elections.
The Law and Justice coalition-led government is accused of a long list of crimes, from failure to combat inflation (Poland has suffered one of the highest inflation rates in Europe over the past year), to political control over the Central Bank and courts, to charges that the government has turned publicly owned television into a pro-Law and Justice propaganda arm, and engaged in politically motivated, illegal wiretapping. The ruling party has denied all allegations against it.
The Civic Platform and Law and Justice have faced a long and bitter rivalry, with the center-right pro-EU opposition party facing off against the populist national-conservative governing party since 2015, when Duda won a narrow victory against Civic Platform-backed President Bronislaw Komorowski, and Law and Justice won pluralities in the parliament and senate and formed a conservative coalition government. The ruling party then managed to hold on to power in the 2019 elections.
The Civic Platform-led Civic Coalition alliance is currently trailing behind the Law and Justice-led United Right bloc, with the latter enjoying a lead of anywhere from 3 to 9 percent, according to polling carried out over the past month. Civic Platform chairman Donald Tusk, Poland’s former prime minister as well as former president of the European Council, said this summer that the Civic Coalition would need a showing of five percent or more above Law and Justice to stand any hope of forming a government. Tusk plans to hold a so-called “Million Hearts” march in Warsaw on October 1 ahead of the vote. A similar event held in June was attended by up to half-a-million opposition-minded Poles.
Along with the elections to parliament, next month’s vote will include a concurrent, four-question referendum on EU migrant policy, the border fence with Belarus, whether foreign entities should be allowed to purchase state actors, and whether the country’s retirement age should be raised from its current 60 years for women and 65 for men.
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Ukraine Exacerbates Tensions

The ongoing security crisis in Ukraine has served to further exacerbate tensions in Polish politics and society, ranging from the economic blowback of scaling back purchases of Russian energy, to Warsaw’s full-throated military support for a Ukrainian government which many Poles have criticized over its lionization of a pro-Nazi Ukrainian militia responsible for the WWII-era murder of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Poles, to the burdens of hosting large numbers of Ukrainian refugees, some of whom have apparently failed to smoothly integrate into Polish society.
In July, lawmakers led by the Law and Justice Party passed a controversial new law cracking down on alleged "Russian influence" operations in Poland, which critics have said has nothing to do with Russia, and everything to do with an attempt to bar major opposition figures, including Tusk, from office.
Group of young Ukrainians confront Poles in Warsaw and attempt to force them to chant Glory to Ukraine. Screenshot of viral video. - Sputnik International, 1920, 26.08.2023
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