Polish nationalist leader charged with inciting murder of Prime Minister Tusk

Robert Bąkiewicz, a prominent nationalist leader with ties to the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, has been charged by prosecutors with three alleged crimes, including inciting the murder of Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

Bąkiewicz denies the accusations, saying that his words have been deliberately misrepresented as part of a political prosecution aimed against him.

On Monday, prosecutors in Warsaw announced the charges, all of which relate to a speech Bąkiewicz gave in Warsaw last October during a march organised by the national-conservative PiS to protest against EU migration policy.

During the address, Bąkiewicz criticised Tusk, accusing him of pursuing a harmful immigration policy and of being subservient to German interests..

Prosecutors argue that some of the rhetoric used by Bąkiewicz constitutes incitement to violence against Tusk, including a call to “pull out the weeds with the use of napalm”.

Bąkiewicz also said “the enemy must be finished off, when he’s swaying in the ring, he is beaten until he lies on the boards” and “don’t just wait for politicians [to act], you have to take up this scythe yourselves”.

As well as being charged with public incitement to commit a crime, which carries a prison sentence of up to three years, Bąkiewicz, who stood as a PiS parliamentary candidate in 2023, is also accused of insulting a public official for calling Tusk a “traitor”, “German footstool”, “German stooge”, “coward” and “weed”.

Poland has a range of laws criminalising insult against various officials and institutions, which have been regularly used, including when PiS was in power between 2015 and 2023.

Finally, Bąkiewicz is accused of inciting hatred based on national, ethnic and religious differences due to his remarks regarding Germans and immigrants. That offence also carries a potential prison sentence of up to three years.

Bąkiewicz, who is the leader of a self-declared Border Defence Movement that has sought to stop Germany from returning migrants to Poland, today attended the regional prosecutor’s office in Warsaw to hear the charges and declare himself not guilty.

Speaking afterwards to supporters, he said that the charges against him are a violation of his constitutional right to free speech and part of a “political circus”. Bąkiewicz also claimed that he had not even been referring to Tusk in the parts of the speech interpreted by prosecutors as a threat.

“If anyone listened to my speech, I was talking about the system, not the people,” Bąkiewicz later told broadcaster Radio Maryja. “I don’t think I even mentioned Donald Tusk by name.”

He also noted that Tusk himself had, in 2021, quoted a poem about using a “rope and a branch” against “authorities who raise their hand against the nation” in reference to PiS-aligned President Andrzej Duda. Tusk subsequently faced no action from prosecutors, who Bąkiewicz said have double standards.

Bąkiewicz has a history of making inflammatory statements aimed those he perceives as enemies of Poland. In 2019, when he was the main organisers of the annual nationalist Independence March in Warsaw, he called for “LGBT totalitarianism” to be “fought with fire, literally with fire”.

During mass protests against the tightening of the abortion law in 2020, he formed a self-declared “Catholic self-defence force”, promising to “crush and destroy” those threatening churches.

He was later convicted of a “hooligan act” after he and his followers physically removed a female protester from in front of a church during those protests. Last year, in one of his final acts in office, President Duda partially pardoned Bąkiewicz of that conviction.

Last month, in a separate case, prosecutors filed an indictment against Bąkiewicz  on various criminal charges relating to his Border Defence Movement, including insulting Polish border officers and inciting hatred against Germans and immigrants