Polish Politician Dies After Stabbing, Sparking Uproar
Polish Politician Dies After Stabbing, Sparking Uproar
WARSAW—The popular mayor of a major Polish city died on Monday after being stabbed during a public address, sparking an uproar in a country torn by political tensions between the conservative government and the opposition.
Pawel Adamowicz, 53 years old, a prominent politician close to the opposition who was mayor of the Baltic port city of Gdansk, was speaking on stage during a televised charity event attended by hundreds of people on Sunday night when he was assaulted.
The attacker, a 27-year-old with a criminal record, stabbed Mr. Adamowicz with a large knife and then grabbed the microphone to shout slogans against the opposition political party. Mr. Adamowicz underwent an emergency surgery but died on Monday afternoon, authorities said. The suspect was immediately arrested and was in custody.
The suspect in Mr. Adamowicz’s killing shouted political slogans on stage on Sunday after the stabbing.
Photo:
stringer/Reuters
The attempts by Poland’s nationalist conservative Law and Justice party to exert more political control over independent government institutions—especially the country’s Supreme Court—has deeply divided society. The opposition Civic Platform, a centrist party of which Mr. Adamowicz was formerly a member, has accused Law and Justice of plunging this country into authoritarian rule. Law and Justice accuses the opposition of looking down on ordinary Poles and cozying up to European elites.
Gdansk, a major European trade and cultural hub that is a Civic Platform stronghold, is home to the democracy icon Lech Walesa and Donald Tusk, the former Polish prime minister who is now president of the European Union Council, an executive body. It also served as a base for the Solidarity union that precipitated the fall of communism in the 1980s.
The murder was the first of a high-ranking Polish politician in office since communism ended in 1989. The political divide was reflected in the reactions to the murder by leading pundits and social media, where some postings appeared to support the killing of Mr. Adamowicz, who had antagonized the far-right with his campaigns for gay rights and refugees.
“Yesterday in Gdansk there was a political crime, a calculated and planned assassination of an elected politician,” Jaroslaw Kurski, Editor-in-Chief of the left-leaning Gazeta Wyborcza wrote in an hard-hitting editorial. Boguslaw Charabota, the editor in chief of the center-right Rzeczpospolita, wrote: “Behind this brutal act of a psychopath is the Polish political psychosis.”
People in Warsaw marched against violence and hatred on Monday in the wake of a deadly attack on the mayor.
Photo:
agencja gazeta/Reuters
Some commentators compared the murder to the killing of Jo Cox, a British liberal legislator who was shot and stabbed to death by a mentally instable man inspired by far-right politics.
Last week in the German city of Bremen, Frank Magnitz, a politician with the far-right party Alternative for Germany, was hospitalized after being attacked by three men in what police suspect could have been a politically motivated attack.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called the murder a tragedy for Poland. President Andrzej Duda of the Law and Justice Party said he would meet political leaders from all parties on Monday to organize a common march against violence. But the opposition refused to march together with the governing party and announced it would hold its own vigils.
Corrections & Amplifications
Jo Cox was a British legislator who was shot and stabbed to death. An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled her name as Joe Cox (Jan. 14).
Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com
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