“Democracy is built on fair elections. Fundamental rules were broken here,” wrote Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) politician Marcin Romanowski on X. He announced that he had filed a notice of suspected election-law violations by Roman Giertych, Stanisław Gawłowski and other unidentified persons, concerning the hand-over of signature lists in the 2019 parliamentary campaign.
On Saturday, TV Republika published recordings of conversations between Donald Tusk, Roman Giertych and Paweł Graś. The material dates from 2019 and was made shortly before the October parliamentary elections.
On the tape Giertych laments to Tusk that Grzegorz Schetyna—then head of Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska)—had effectively blocked his bid to run for both the Senate and the Sejm. He says he therefore passed the collected support signatures to Stanisław Gawłowski:
“Listen, if it weren’t for the fact that I had those signatures—and I decided not to run because I didn’t want to risk it, you know, since I felt he was pushing me to run in Łomianki, the northern district—I took it as someone wanting to give me a beating and, in the process, hurt you, so that the candidate you support would lose. Unfortunately, it would have hurt you, and he, well, took them from him. But Staszek, because he got my signatures, registered the committee, and then he realized that he’d be running anyway.”
The notice
Even this single fragment caused a major stir, prompting the filing of the criminal notice—submitted by Marcin Romanowski.
“The recording shows that in 2019 Giertych gathered signatures in blanco—that is, at a minimum without indicating the candidate—in order to register himself and then passed them on to register Gawłowski as a Senate candidate. That is not merely skirting the law; it is a crime under Article 248(6) of the Penal Code, which covers manipulation of support lists when signatures are obtained without full information about the committee and the candidate,”
he wrote on X.
Romanowski also posted an excerpt of the notice’s rationale, citing the “illegal acquisition and use of personal data” and “abuse in the creation of electoral documents.”
“Democracy rests on honest elections. Here, fundamental principles have been violated,” Romanowski concluded.