2023-10-11 21:13 update: 2023-10-12, 14:17
Fot. PAP/Tomasz Wojtasik
Mateusz Morawiecki, the Polish prime minister, has alleged that Donald Tusk, the main opposition leader, made death threats against President Andrzej Duda.
"Donald Tusk threatened our president, Andrzej Duda, by saying that he would hang him with a rope," Morawiecki said at a Wednesday meeting with residents of Kalisz in south-eastern Poland.
His allegation was made as Poland prepares to go to the polls on October 15 for parliamentary elections.
Morawiecki was referring to a speech Tusk made in December 2021 at a demonstration outside the Presidential Palace against the amendment to the Broadcasting Act that some claimed would threaten TVN, Poland's biggest privately owned television network.
Addressing the crowd, Tusk quoted a few lines from Czeslaw Milosz's poem "You Who Wronged.'
"Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born.
"The words are written down, the deed, the date. And you'd have done better with a winter dawn,
A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight," Tusk cited Milosz at the time.
"Remember these words of the great poet, remember what awaits every power that betrays its homeland," Tusk added, saying that he addressed these words to the resident of the Presidential Palace "and his principal."
According to Morawiecki, Tusk "had the nerve to threaten the president" and used the poem for this purpose.
"This is how his statement was perceived by millions of people," he argued.
Tusk was criticised at the time for his choice of poetry, with people accusing him of calling for the president to commit suicide and of spreading hate. (PAP)
mr/md/jch
