The ruling Civic Coalition, led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, is attempting to extricate itself from scandals involving its officers who have been found guilty of paedophilia and zoophilia.
The most publicised of the scandals affecting the current ruling party has come in Kłodzko, south-western Poland, where a woman, who cannot be named under Polish privacy laws, was convicted of assisting her husband, who is serving a 25-year jail sentence for acts of paedophilia and zoophilia.
The woman was a Tusk party official who had acted as the local election agent even when she had already been charged with the offences in question. She has been sentenced to six and a half years’ imprisonment.
Poland’s most popular YouTube channel Kanał Zero last week broadcast lengthy material about the case uncovered by local journalist Marcin Torz that many found upsetting as it included testimony of the daughter of the accused who had been a victim of their actions and details of how a domestic animal, a dog, was also a victim of the offences.
The Prime Minister of the last PiS government Mateusz Morawiecki has commented on the case: “It is impossible to remain indifferent to the continuous flow of information regarding the paedophilia scandal in Kłodzko. What was happening there is absolutely shocking and the leaders of the Civic Coalition consistently pretend that this is not their issue”, said Morawiecki in a social media post
PiS MEP Tobiasz Bocheński also spoke out, addressing the fact that the issue has become salient with the public because of independent internet rather than mainstream media.
“The Polish public would not have learned about the paedophilia and zoophilia scandal without internet freedom. The silence of a vast number of media outlets on this matter is terrifying. This is the loudest media silence in the history of Poland.”
Bocheński was alluding to the fact that most of Poland’s liberal media sympathetic to the Tusk government has played down the scandals taking the view that the ruling party is not in any way responsible for a few bad apples among its ranks. However, the same media have in the past publicised cases of local opposition Conservatives (PiS) officials being involved in domestic violence and have reported extensively on paedophilia scandals in the Catholic Church.
But the issue has gone viral on social media. According to the Polish internet watchdog Res Futura in just seven days the issue of paedophilia and zoophilia in Kłodzko generated 139 million in outreach on social media which meant that an average user in the Poland saw the topic in their feeds between four to six times.
In another case affecting Tusk’s party in Złotów, western Poland, which is also conspicuous by its absence from mainstream media, an appeals court overturned a 11 year prison sentence handed down to a local Tusk party official relating to child abuse of 14 girls.
The official had been convicted for 21 offences linked to sexual offenses against minors and the recording of nude images of children without parental knowledge or consent. Between 2021 and 2023 he had allegedly been meeting girls and telling them to undress, touching them, and photographing them while claiming the images were part of medical documentation.
Portal wPolityce alleges that complaints involving the man date back as far as 2011, with further allegations emerging around 2015 and 2016 involving underage trainees. Although the matter was reportedly brought to police and prosecutors, the case was allegedly dropped at an early stage.
The portal warned that it will soon be reporting on several other cases involving Tusk party activists which involve allegations of child abuse.
That history has fuelled accusations that the party activist benefited from political protection while continuing to hold influence locally. According to critics, he remained in charge of the party’s Złotów structures from 2014 onward, helped organise campaigns, shaped election lists, and regularly appeared alongside local officials and senior party figures.
He was only suspended and later expelled from Civic Coalition after his 2023 arrest, a fact now being used by opponents to argue that the party acted only when the scandal became impossible to ignore.
The appeal court’s ruling in January of this year to quash a sentence handed down by a court in 2024 was based purely on the fact that the judge who had handed down the original sentence had been appointed during the time of the last Conservative (PiS) government on recommendation of the National Council of the Judiciary (KRS), the body whose independence has been questioned by European courts.
However, a recent European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling has stated that judges appointed by the KRS cannot be automatically deemed not to be independent and their judgements faulty.
Polish PM Tusk rejected any wrongdoing by his party and condemned PiS for raising the local scandals. “It is particularly odious to try and make political capital out of the crime of paedophilia. There has been no cover up of these cases. People have been sentenced and will go to prison”.
He also hit back at PiS alleging that it has tried to protect its own politician suspected of paedophilia, but would not name the individual involved. But it he has himself commented on salacious allegations in the past.
Last year during the presidential election campaign Tusk used the testimony of a convict to accuse President Karol Nawrocki, then the presidential candidate for PiS, of being involved in pimping in a Gdansk hotel in which Nawrocki had years ago been a security guard.
Nawrocki denied the allegations and is suing the media outlet which published the allegations which politicians from Tusk’s party have used extensively during the presidential election and thereafter.
