Thousands of Poles crowded into the streets of Gdansk yesterday/SAT to bid farewell to the city’s mayor who was murdered in a crime that has prompted warnings from his colleagues of the dangers posed by a growing climate of hate.
Pawel Adamowicz died on Monday after being stabbed multiple times in front of thousands during a live charity event the night before.
Saturday was a day of national mourning in Poland, with flags flying at half-mast across the country. The Polish president, Andrzej Duda, yesterday joined the funeral procession in Gdansk.
Adamowicz’s attacker, a man known for violence and for suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, had only got out of prison last month.
He made no attempt to flee and said Adamowicz had to die because his old party, Civic Platform, was responsible for his incarceration.
While there is no evidence to suggest the murder was political, Rafal Dutkiewicz, who served as mayor of the southern city of Wroclaw for 16 years until retiring in November and was a friend of Adamowicz, claims that a growing and prevailing atmosphere of hatred in Polish politics played its part.
“There is definitely a link,” he told The Telegraph on Saturday, a day after he helped carry his friend’s coffin from Gdansk’s Solidarity museum, where it lay in state, to the funeral hearse.
“The deepness of the hate is great. There is a Polish expression: ‘when you plant the seeds of wind, you get a storm’.” Those who agree with Mr Dutkiewicz argue that the current Polish government, led by the nationalist Law and Justice party, had helped foster an atmosphere of hate and intolerance.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the party’s leader, has branded anti-government protestors as the “worst types of Poles” and opposition MPs as “murdering scum”.
Meanwhile far-right groups, once confined to the distant margins of Polish politics, have moved closer to the centre in recent years, apparently emboldened by the change in political winds.
The mayors of Poland’s big cities, often at odds with the conservative and nationalist agenda of the government, have frequently found themselves the target of hate.
“As mayors we got threats and I am pretty sure the political tension and the climate of debate made it happen,” said Mr Dutkiewicz.
He, Adamowicz and nine other mayors received “political death certificates” from Mlodziez Wszechpolska (The All-Polish Youth), a nationalist and ultra-conservative group, after they signed a positive statement on refugees.
“The statement wasn’t very strong but the reaction was awful,” he said. “In such a situation the state should react against the dissemination of hate in a public space, but there was no reaction from the government, the courts or the state. It was somehow allowed by the political side that is now in power in Poland.”
The government and its supporters stress that extremism has no place in Polish politics and they reject any claims that they contributes to an atmosphere of intolerance.
They have also accused the opposition of peddling hate through bitter attacks on Law and Justice figures. But this cuts little ice with Mr Dutkiewicz.
“When you listen to the speeches of Kaczynski they aren’t a melody of love,” he said. “It is the opposite. There is a feeling that they want to push the opposition to the edge, they want the opposition to disappear; this is the problem.”