Warsaw Independence March: crowd estimates from 120,000 to a million, no serious incidents

Crowd figures diverge

The Independence March marking Poland's national day went ahead in Warsaw on Wednesday, 11 November, four days after a shooting in a Kraków market square on Saturday, 7 November that killed six people. Marcin Osowski, head of the march's organising staff and leader of Młodzież Wszechpolska, put the crowd at about 700,000 and said it was larger than in previous years. Warsaw city hall estimated about 250,000 participants, while the Warsaw Security Centre cited up to 250,000. Onet put the number at 120,000 to 160,000, and the WP portal, working from the crowd on the main route, arrived at roughly 150,000. Organisers' own figures varied, with Stern reporting more than half a million and Niezalezna up to a million, and no independent count confirmed any of them.

Osowski summed up the day in these words:

It was a true march of a million hearts.

Calm streets, flares and the Kraków shadow

Police spokesman Andrzej Fijołek said the celebrations passed safely across the country and that no serious incidents had threatened anyone's life or health, adding that police work was not yet over. Interior minister Marcin Kierwiński had said on Sunday that the services were ready to secure all gatherings on 11 November, the march included, after the Kraków attack. Warsaw had banned carrying weapons and using fireworks that day, yet N-tv reported that flares still burned along the route. Tagesschau noted shouting but no violence this year, unlike earlier years when clashes broke out on the margins, including in 2011 when a TVN broadcast van was set alight. Speeches at the national-day ceremonies, by President Karol Nawrocki, Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Deputy Prime Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, honoured police, doctors and residents who helped the victims in Kraków and in the Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski events.

Confederacja spokesman Michał Nieznański told Rzeczpospolita that the flares were the only thing the services had complained about, and that they belong to the march:

The only things the services complained about, flares, are an integral part of the Independence March.

Nawrocki at the front, Tusk stays away

President Karol Nawrocki walked at the head of the procession holding a white-red flag, accompanied by his older son and presidential officials including Zbigniew Bogucki, Paweł Szefernaker, Bartosz Grodecki and Marcin Przydacz. Before the march, at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, he gave a speech that Tagesschau read as criticism of Tusk's government. Tusk had announced he would stay away, and Rzeczpospolita reported that he invited the president to a joint meeting while Nawrocki criticised the finance minister. N-tv reported that the presidential palace rejected the invitation to reconciliation. The march took place amid a power struggle over the Constitutional Tribunal, whose legitimacy has been questioned for years over contested judicial appointments under earlier right-wing governments, and a year before the parliamentary election it became a rally against Tusk's government.

Participants and political reactions

Former KO MP Marcin Józefaciuk, now unaffiliated, wrote on X that he had attended as he has for several years and that his section of the march was peaceful. He said that when someone sang an altered version of the anthem through a megaphone, the people around reacted at once and the singing stopped. He added that participants came over to talk, took photos with him and that one shared a sandwich with him. Osowski said politicians from PiS, including Jarosław Kaczyński, along with Rozwój Plus, Konfederacja and Konfederacja Korony Polskiej, took part. Stern reported banners reading "Make Europe white again", "Poland is not for sale" and "Remigration, Deportation", and stalls near the Palace of Culture selling antisemitic and anti-Ukrainian books and far-right symbols. The march's motto, "Polak w Polsce gospodarzem", translates as "The Pole is the master in Poland".