I find it impossible how government agencies can claim honestly that number of citizens taking part in today's march was around 200,000. This is the fourth major march I have take part in (the one on 4 June in Warsaw and the two anti-Brexit marches in London in March and October 2019) and today's felt the biggest. I joined from the south around twenty minutes before the midday start; already the whole area around Rondo Dmowskiego was rammed rigid.
Below: 12 noon, the speeches start. After the speeches, the march will begin, headed north.
After listening to the key speeches, but before the march sets off, I figured that I was in the wrong place, so I dived into the subway under the roundabout - coming out on the northern side, I could see the crowds were thicker still. So trying to get ahead of the march, I took the Metro one stop north to Świętokrzyska. The trains were running at intervals of as little as 1 minute 20 seconds!
From here I walked the route along aleja Jana Pawła II. Both sides of the wide avenue were thronged with flag-waving people - not marching - yet. But column would move very slowly; not so much a march as a shuffle. So I had time to pop into legendary bar Jaś i Małgosia (where my aunt Jadzia worked back in the 1970s!) for a swift IPA. Suitable refreshed, I found I was still way ahead of the front of the march.
Moving on to Rondo Radosława, the final destination, I took up position in the middle of tram tracks, looking south along al. JP II, watching a slow-motion human tsunami bearing down on where I was standing.
Below: a rather impressionist image from my phone at 20x zoom...
Below: the march reaches the end - time for a few more speeches (interestingly, mentions of women's rights drew the most applause), and the national anthem at the end. Then off to catch the train back to Chynów, which was rush-hour full.
However, by the time the train had reached Piaseczno and Zalesie Górne, the flag-bearing passengers were thinning out. In Chynów, PiS banners on fences and walls outnumber PSL banners by three to one and KO banners are nowhere to be seen. It will be a tough race in two weeks' time.
This time last year:
Levels of Detail
This time two years ago:
Droga donikąd by Józef Mackiewicz
This time three years ago:
Words that pop into the mind, unbidden
[This morning's word: contumely]
This time five years ago:
Hops there for the taking
This time six years ago:
Two weeks and two days of travel
This time seven years ago:
Final end to a local landmark
This time 12 years ago:
Independence Day
This time 13 years:
Out and about in Jeziorki
This time 14 years ago:
Funeral of Lt. Cmdr. Tadeusz Lesisz
This time 15 years ago:
Puławska by night
Posts
8 comments:
Here's a depressing read about the catastrophe of migrants being pushed into Poland by Lukashenko, which looks like being a real issue at the upcoming elections. Poland gained much credit worldwide for the help it extended to Ukrainians fleeing the war (despite a problematic Poland/Ukraine history), but now the positive image is in danger of being tarnished abroad. Not that the issue isn't a real one, but there needs to be an international solution to this crisis, without the ruling party stooping to xenophobic rhetoric, possibly involving the UN and the EU and perhaps some kind of holding camps which would provide basic humanitarian assistance.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/02/beatings-dog-bites-and-barbed-wire-life-and-death-on-the-poland-belarus-border
But a friend in Poland just told me that there’s an ongoing scandal about the Foreign Ministry selling visas to the EU to prospective migrants from outside of Europe. This from the party which is supposedly tough on immigration via Belarus!
More about the visa scandal here:
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66869671.amp&sa=U&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwj306DA1deBAxXm8LsIHXbhCyQQFnoECBkQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1dxJBt3T5_twiU91SjqzBh
Final comment: about the numbers taking part in the march. My friend in Warsaw just sent me a photo he took from the Pałac Kultury, with streets below jammed with people. He says there were easily over a million.
(As an aside, his taking the photo from the height of the building reminded me of the story of Guy de Maupassant having lunch everyday at the Eiffel Tower, which he hated, because that was the only place in Paris where he couldn’t actually see it)
Cheers
MK
@ Michał Karski.
Phew! Politics lecture coming up.
Migrants. Solid reportage from the Guardian. This problem, weaponised by Lukashenka, will only intensify as climate change makes 50C-55C heat a reality across Africa and Asia. A policy response that is agreeable to a consensus within any European society will be hard to reach. Certainly, what I saw on Sunday were signs of the more open and tolerant part of Polish society - but a) it's only a small part of Poland (mainly urban) and b) the tidal wave of black and brown humanity that's coming has barely reached Poland. /2
@ Michał Karski
Until the visa scandal broke, I had a sneaking feeling that PiS was actually handling migration well. Since it took power, the number of non-European people on the streets of Polish cities has increased greatly (from close to zero to seeing several day, to being commonplace) - AND THERE'S BEEN NO PROBLEMS! At the same time, PiS has been reassuring voters that it's in control of the migration issue - and people seem to have been OK with that. The Ministry of Agriculture is said to have assessed that Poland is a million people short on the land; three years ago, I saw the first groups of Nepalese women in Chynów, here to pick fruit. Now, Nepalese fruit-pickers are part of the local landscape; no one's particularly bothered... UNTIL THE VISA SCANDAL BROKE... now it turns out that individuals and recruitment agencies might have been buying work-permit visas via bribes that made their way to PiS party funds. The latest poll of polls (here https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/poland/) suggest this might have cost PiS up to two percentage points of support... We shall see. It is tight.
@ Michał Karski
3/ It's clear that there were over a million taking part in the march on Saturday (if you include those who dipped in and out, those who joined along the route); anyone now saying '200,000' is a liar.
Great pity about the apparent polarisation of Polish society. My parents were thrilled when they were able to travel to Poland again fifty years after they had to leave the country. In a way, I’m glad they’re not around to see what’s happening on the political scene now. They would have been disappointed, I think. Their generation fought for a free Poland and people of all political persuasions put their differences aside during that fight - and I don’t just mean WWII, but the years of exile which followed.
Post a Comment