A gunman dressed in military fatigues drove through Kraków’s historic Old Town shooting at people passing through the Main Market Square on Saturday afternoon when the area was at its busiest, killing at least nine people at the time of this article’s publication. He was finally stopped by senior constables Jakub Kulik and Artur Morański, the first of whom is a former soldier in the elite 6th Airborne Brigade in Kraków who recently completed his service and joined the police, according to MP Andrzej Śliwka.
The Interior Minister, who represents the ruling liberal coalition, claimed that “everything suggests that [the killer] was fascinated by far-right ideologies” and held “ultra-nationalist views.” At the same time, however, posts from his two now-deleted Facebook pages suggest that he was “just a lefty, an antifa thug and an anarcho-communist. He mocked Christianity at every turn” and supported LGBT. He did supposedly post imagery associated with a ‘far-right’ group, but his “social media posts are inconsistent”.
“They seem to have included anti-Catholic and pro-Communist posts, as well as manga and animé type posts”. Moreover, “He allegedly attended the 2020 pro-abortion protests in Poland”, signaled that he was a proud communist, and “painted his nails black.” The full spectrum of his views might explain why he chose this particular Saturday afternoon to carry out his attack, prior to which he also killed his parents and sister, since there was an anti-government protest there against the liberal premier’s judicial coup.
Whether it’s related or not, the optics of an arguably leftist psychopath carrying out a mass killing at the place where an anti-government protest was taking place could further polarize Poland even more than it already is. For background, the country was already split in half between liberals and conservatives even before the liberals weaponized the Interior Ministry to seize the Constitutional Tribunal, which is actually a German takeover of Poland by proxy to prepare Europe for war with Russia.
Conservative grey cardinal Jarosław Kaczyński appealed for supporters to cancel their planned protests outside of the Tribunal from 8-9 November during the two-day national mourning that allied President Karol Nawrocki declared. Polish Independence Day is on 11 November, and the Independence March that annually takes place in Warsaw is expected to be larger than ever this year since the constitutionalists plan to send a message against the putschists, and Nawrocki will take part as usual.
Therein lies the possible political consequence of this leftist terrorist attack since liberal Prime Minister Donald Tusk might order his Interior Minister and the allied Mayor of Warsaw to cancel the Independence March on security-related grounds. In that scenario, many of the participants might defy the decree, possibly including Nawrocki himself. That could set the stage for a fierce showdown between the constitutionalists and putschists in the heart of the capital on one of Poland’s main holidays.
It’s premature to exactly predict what’ll happen, but the sequence of events detailed above could be explosive given the pent-up political energy brought about by Tusk’s judicial coup less than two weeks ago. Circling back to the lede, the mass killing that just took place in Kraków could plausibly be exploited to set everything into motion if the ruling liberal coalition fears the optics of this year’s politically tinted march, but hopefully they won’t cancel the march at the risk of a potentially violent showdown.
