Two convicted Polish politicians are in prison. Suddenly she receives President Duda in the presidential palace. An intensification of the change of government?
Warsaw – The President of Poland, Andrzej Duda, received two former government politicians in the Presidential Palace on Tuesday morning (January 9th). The special thing about the visit: Ex-Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski and his State Secretary Maciej Wasik were actually supposed to begin a two-year prison sentence that day. Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk accused Duda of hindering the imprisonment of the convicted MPs.
“Mr President, my fervent appeal for the good of the Polish state: you must stop this spectacle. It will lead us to a very dangerous situation,” Tusk urged the president on Tuesday. He warned Duda and the chairman of the replaced national-conservative ruling party PiS, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, of the consequences of the action.
Power struggle or laughingstock in Poland? Acting against the background of ongoing conflicts
“We are not hiding. At the moment we are with Poland's president until evil loses,” the two convicts told the press in the courtyard of the presidential palace in the afternoon. They reported that the police had searched their homes in the morning but had not found either of them. How long Wasik and Kaminski planned to stay in the presidential palace remained unclear.
What at first glance seems like a bad joke turned out to be a new level of escalation in the change of government after the Polish election. Already after the election, Duda initially preferred the PiS to form a government, despite the lack of a majority.
The power struggle between governments continued after December 15, 2023: the day on which the center-left government of Donald Tusk was supposed to replace the national conservative PiS. President Duda was also a former PiS member and still sympathized with their politics. Recently there was a conflict over state television that further hardened both fronts. Also at the press conference on January 9th, Wasik called on PiS supporters to take part in a demonstration against Tusk's government on Thursday in Warsaw.
A long story: The trial of Kaminski and Wasik
Kaminski and Wasik were convicted of abuse of office on appeal by a Warsaw district court in December. The reason was an affair by the anti-corruption authority, then headed by Kaminski, which allegedly wanted to discredit the then Agriculture Minister Andrzej Lepper with a deliberately staged corruption case.
Duda tried to pardon the two politicians in 2015 after the first trial. However, since the appeal process was still ongoing, his pardon was declared unlawful. The Supreme Court reasoned that only those who have already been legally convicted can be pardoned. The current president emphasized several times that, in his opinion, the pardon continues to apply – contrary to the opinion of leading constitutional lawyers in Poland. Against this background, the two convicted politicians announced that they would continue to fulfill their mandate in parliament and appear at meetings.
“Anyone who obstructs or frustrates criminal proceedings by helping a criminal to evade criminal responsibility (…) will be punished with a prison sentence of three months to five years,” Prime Minister Tusk quoted from the Polish Criminal Code and sentenced openly addressed Duda. However, Tusk ruled out a violent arrest in the presidential palace. (dpa/LisMah)
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