Will mayor’s death spell the end for Polish democracy?

Unlike the Germans and French, Poles have little experience of terrorist violence, said Philipp Fritz in Die Welt (Berlin). So the killing of Paweł Adamowicz, the popular liberal mayor of Gdansk and one of the government’s sternest critics, has sent them into a collective state of shock. Adamowicz was speaking at a charity fundraiser when an assassin walked on stage and stabbed him – shouting revenge against the Civic Platform party to which Adamowicz had once belonged, and which was in office when his killer was jailed for bank robbery five years ago. The ruling Law and Justice Party (PIS) insists the crime wasn’t politically motivated. The killer had a criminal background, it points out, and Adamowicz was no longer a member of Civic Platform, and never held responsibility for courts or prisons. But liberals claim the shrill tone of political debate unleashed by PIS politicians played a role in inciting the murder.

For once, let’s resist the temptation to point the finger, said Artur Bartkiewicz in Rzeczpospolita (Warsaw). The killer was clearly a madman. Who knows why he chose Adamowicz? It could have been anyone. His unnecessary, meaningless death should unite us in solidarity and silence, if only for a moment: to politicise it only serves to entrench our differences. Stop this pretence, said Jarosław Kurski in Gazeta Wyborcza (Warsaw). Adamowicz was targeted because he was a hate figure for PIS media. The abuse was endless: they called him a “German”, a “thief”, a “propagator of homosexuality”, a “communist”, an “EU puppet”. He was vilified for wanting to give shelter in his city to refugees, and for his high-profile support of the Great Orchestra of Christmas, a liberal medical charity – another bogey of the PIS – which has been subjected to a relentless hate campaign from the state-owned media.

The warning by PIS not to politicise the killing is in fact a regular ploy “used by regressive forces to diffuse justified outrage about their policies”, said Maciej Kisilowski on Politico (Brussels). PIS is now calling for security to be ramped up at public events – an easy way to set further constraints on the rights of opposition groups to organise. Right-wing think tanks – joined, alas, by some liberal voices – are also calling for online hate speech to be criminalised. That just opens the way for Pis-controlled courts to clamp down on the opposition. The government vows that its public prosecutors will discover the truth, but it’s “laughably naive” to think the same tame officials could conduct an honest investigation of Adamowicz’s murder. Only months ago, they tried to frame him on absurd tax fraud charges (a clear attempt to derail his successful bid for a sixth term as mayor). Beware: the government may now exploit the atmosphere of fear and emergency to “do away with what’s left of Poland’s democracy”.