Lex Tusk

On 29 May 2023, President of Poland Andrzej Duda announced that he would sign a bill which would establish an investigative panel into whether the liberal party Civic Platform, which was leading the opposition in the national Parliament at the time, had allowed the country to be influenced by Russia under the cabinets of Donald Tusk and Ewa Kopacz from 2007 to 2015, thus making Poland dependent on Russian oil and natural gas.^[3][4][24] The bill, which was published on the Journal of Laws the following day,^[25] would allow the Parliament to create a 10-member commission, whose head would be directly selected by Prime Minister Morawiecki,^[26] that would deliver an initial report on 17 September 2023, ahead of the parliamentary election that was set to be held later in the year;^[20][25][27] the panel would also be allowed to ban any political figures found to have subjected Poland to Russian influence from holding most official public duties for ten years.^[3][4][25]

Both Duda and the Law and Justice party, which supported the bill's passage, were accused by critics and opposition parties of designing the legislation with the specific goal of targeting opponents and removing them from public life,^[2][20][4] as well as harming support for Civic Platform's leader, former Prime Minister Tusk: for this reason, the law was nicknamed the "Lex Tusk", or the "Tusk Law".^[20][3][25] Some critics compared the law's goals to the political rhetoric that was originally spread by US Senator Joseph McCarthy during the late 1940s and the 1950s.^[2][28] The "Lex Tusk" also drew criticism from the European Union, through official statements by Věra Jourová^[29] and Didier Reynders,^[23][30] and the United States, with US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller filing an official announcement.^[25][30]

On 2 June 2023, Duda announced that he sent an urgent amendment containing several proposed revisions of the bill to the Polish Parliament, encouraging lawmakers to "act swiftly" and stating that he was reacting to the public outrage surrounding the law's initial passage.^[27][31] According to the Polish president, the proposed amendments would ensure that the law was subject to non-partisan review, that no parliamentary members would be allowed to be part of the commission, and that none of the politicians who would face charges as a result of the investigation could be banned from public office.^[27][31]

June 4 protests

On 4 June 2023, former Prime Minister Donald Tusk, together with several other members of the Civic Platform party, organized a series of anti-government protests in Warsaw, Poland's capital city:^[19][32] people from all around the country joined the demonstration,^[2][19][33] while crowds also gathered in Kraków, Szczecin, Poznań and other Polish cities.^[1][2][33] The protests in Warsaw were notably attended by former President and Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa,^[19][32][34] incumbent mayor of Warsaw Rafał Trzaskowski,^[2][19] social activist Sylwia Gregorczyk-Abram^[19][32] and New Left leader Włodzimierz Czarzasty, among others.^[32] Despite having maintained a more cautious approach in the weeks preceding the event,^[20] many other opposition groupings, with the exception of far-right party Confederation,^[32] eventually sent their respective representatives to Warsaw,^[19][20][32] in response to the approval of the "Lex Tusk".^[20]

Although there was no official confirmation of the size of the rally, the estimated amount of participants in the protests in Warsaw ranged from 300,000 people, according to Polish web portal Onet,^[2][35] to 500,000 people, according to estimates by the city hall and Tusk himself.^[2][19][32] The march was symbolically convened to mark the 34th anniversary of the semi-free elections held in 1989, which have widely been seen as the catalyst for the fall of the Communist regime and a peaceful transition to parliamentarian democracy in Poland.^[19][20]

March of a Million Hearts

On 1 October 2023, a second wave of protests took place throughout the country, and primarily in the city of Warsaw, which was visited by former Prime Minister and protest leader Donald Tusk. The organizers put the attendance at at least a few hundred thousand, the Warsaw city hall at 1 million, and the police at over 100,000.