Poland’s largest opposition party led a march on Sunday aimed at mobilising voters against the right-wing government, which it accuses of eroding democracy and following Hungary and Turkey down the path to autocracy.
The local government in Warsaw estimated that 500,000 people joined the march, which was led by the opposition party to which the city’s mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, belongs. It was not possible to verify that figure.
Former prime minister Donald Tusk had called on Poles to march with him for the sake of the nation’s future.
His party and security officials had predicted that tens of thousands of people would join the demonstration.
Supporters of the march have warned that elections this autumn might be the last chance to stop the erosion of democracy under the ruling party, Law and Justice.
In power since 2015, Law and Justice has found a popular formula, combining higher social spending with socially conservative policies and support for the church in the mostly Catholic nation.
However, critics have warned for years that it is reversing many of the democratic achievements of the 1980s.
Even the United States government has intervened at times when it felt the government was eroding press freedom and academic freedom in the area of Holocaust research.
Critics point mainly to the party’s step-by-step takeover of most of the judiciary as well as its use of state media for heavy-handed propaganda used to tarnish opponents.
It has also tapped into animosity against minorities, particularly LGBTQ people, whose struggle for rights it depicts as a threat to families and national identity. A crackdown on abortion rights has triggered mass protests.
The march is being held on the 34th anniversary of the first democratic elections in 1989, after Poland emerged from decades of communist rule.
It will be a test for Mr Tusk’s Civic Platform, a centrist and pro-European party which has been trailing behind Law and Justice in the polls, but which seems set to gain more support after the passage of a controversial law.
The law allows for the creation of a commission to investigate Russian influence in Poland.
Critics argue that the commission would have unconstitutional powers, including the capacity to exclude officials from public life for a decade. They fear it will be used by the ruling party to remove Mr Tusk and other opponents from public life.
Amid uproar in Poland and criticism from the US and the EU, President Andrzej Duda, who signed the law on Monday, was already proposing amendments to it on Friday.
Some Poles say it could come to resemble the investigations of Joseph McCarthy, the US senator whose anti-Communist campaign in the early 1950s led to hysteria and political persecution.
That fear was underlined last weekend when the ruling party leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, was asked by a reporter if he still had trust in the defence minister in connection with a Russian missile that fell in Poland in December.
“I am forced … to view you as a representative of the Kremlin,” he told the reporter. “Because only the Kremlin wants this man to stop being the minister of national defence.”
The journalist’s employer, TVN, called it the latest attack on independent media.
Paradoxically, the plans for the new commission appeared to mobilise greater support for Mr Tusk.
The former premier, who is also a former EU council president, had called for the march weeks ago, urging people to demonstrate “against high prices, theft and lies, for free elections and a democratic, European Poland”.
It received a mixed reception.
Initially some opposition figures planned to stay away, but after Mr Duda signed the law, other opposition leaders announced they would join in.
Law and Justice sought to discourage participation in the march with a video spot using Auschwitz as a theme – drawing criticism from the state museum that preserves the site.
Poland is expected to hold general elections in October, though a date has not yet been set.
