President Duda of Poland has scrapped proposals to restrict media access to parliament after talks with the governing party yesterday and continued protests from opposition MPs.
Mr Duda met Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the speaker of parliament and head of the Law and Justice Party (PiS), and appealed to all sides of the political spectrum for calm.
Last night the president told Poland’s TVP public broadcaster that the PiS “has abandoned its proposal which triggered the row we saw in parliament . . . Everything has been reset.”
About two dozen members of Civic Platform, the opposition party, had been taking turns to occupy parliament through the night and their leader pledged to stay there for days. “We will be on the streets until [the government is] done destroying the country,” Mateusz Kijowski, leader of the protest movement Committee for the Defence of Democracy, said.
Mr Kaczynski and Beata Szydlo, the prime minister, had to be evacuated from the parliament building early on Saturday morning amid reports of police using teargas to break up protests.
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The stand-off was the culmination of more than 12 months of tensions since the nationalist, Eurosceptic PiS came to power in October last year. The government has been criticised for what critics have described as anti-democratic policies to strengthen its own powers.
It has tried to impose changes to the constitutional court, leading the European Commission to warn that democracy and the rule of law were under threat. The government has also approved legislation that human rights groups have argued will curtail freedom of assembly.
Some demonstrators described protests at the weekend as Maidan in Warsaw, a reference to the uprising in Ukraine two years ago.
The dispute escalated on Friday when PiS politicians moved a planned vote on the 2017 budget to a side room and the opposition accused them of contravening legal procedure.
Political commentators said that the use of force was conceivable for the first time since martial law was imposed by the Communist leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski 35 years ago.