The Sejm, the lower house of the Polish Parliament, held a solemn session this Tuesday that has been marred by an anti-Semitic scandal carried out by a far-right deputy. While the parliamentarians in the chamber directed their questions to the newly appointed Donald Tusk, before granting a vote of confidence to his Government proposal, Grzegorz Braun, from Confederation, took a fire extinguisher and extinguished a menorah, a Jewish candelabra lit in the hall of the building in a ceremony for the Hanukkah holiday.
The images of a Braun out of his mind heading towards the menorah and struggling when they tried to prevent him from consummating his action, have quickly spread across Polish social networks. The presence of a good number of international journalists, as it is a crucial session for the change of government in the country, has catapulted the scandal beyond Polish borders.
The deputy, after creating chaos with a thick cloud of white dust in the hall of the building, went to the gallery of the chamber, where he described the Hanukkah party as a “satanic cult.” Braun was immediately expelled from the House. “It is unacceptable. “This cannot happen again, it is a shame,” Tusk said in statements to the press.
The session was briefly interrupted while the Sejm presidency decided how to sanction Braun. At the emergency meeting, all participants approved a sanction that deprives him of his salary for three months and of his entire parliamentary allowance for another six, except for Krzysztof Bosak of Confederation, who abstained. The Chamber will inform the Prosecutor's Office about what happened and is considering withdrawing his immunity.
All parliamentary groups have expressed their rejection of the facts, including the Confederation, despite Bosak's hesitations when it comes to penalizing him. The parties have called for Braun's expulsion from both his party and the House. The next Minister of Justice, Adam Bodnar, has indicated in a message on X, formerly Twitter, that the deputy may have violated up to four articles of the penal code. The tumult generated by the episode delayed the interventions of the deputies and the vote on the Tusk Government.
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Sejm President Szymon Holownia had invited members of the Jewish community, including Israel's ambassador Yacov Livne, to the annual Hanukkah celebration. Magdalena Gudzinska-Adamczyk, the woman who tried to avoid the incident and struggled with the far-right, appeared in shock in statements to the press. “This is unthinkable for me. “We are in Poland, in the 21st century, we are not in 1939, right?” the doctor said before the cameras, with her face covered in white powder. “I no longer feel safe in this country, and before me I was,” he added.
Braun is known in the country for his anti-Semitism. The Confederation deputy promotes conspiracy theories about Jews and claims that they want to take over Poland. He also advocates criminalizing homosexuality and has been accused of having ties to Russia.
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