Poland says it has zero tolerance for neo-fascism
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WARSAW - Poland's right-wing government said on Thursday it had no tolerance for neo-fascism, after opposition lawmakers charged that its nationalist, eurosceptic focus was helping to reinvigorate the far right.
The issue has dominated local media since the commercial television station TVN showed on Saturday a far-right organisation - officially registered since 2011 - secretly celebrating Adolf Hitler's 128th birthday in a Polish forest last April.
Filmed with a hidden camera, the footage showed members of the group dressed in Nazi uniforms, burning a wooden swastika, making Nazi salutes and sharing a cake with a symbol of a swastika made of chocolate cookies.
The same group, called "Pride and Modernity" (DiN), hanged portraits of opposition lawmakers in November, after the lawmakers backed a European Parliament resolution calling on the Polish government to reverse its overhaul of the judiciary and condemn a "fascist march" held earlier that month in Warsaw.
"There is zero tolerance for any displays of promoting, affirmation, glorifying of criminal totalitarian regimes," Interior Minister Joachim Brudzinski said in parliament on Thursday.
"The fact that such creeps have to hide in a forest is a success of our whole society," he said, adding authorities would seek to ban the organisation and prosecute its members.
One example given by opposition lawmakers was that the prosecutor's office, brought under direct government control by PiS, has appealed the conviction of a man who burned a Jewish effigy in Wroclaw in 2015.
