Polish minister threatens to sue those accusing him of giving speech drunk

Poland’s interior minister, Marcin Kierwiński, has announced that he will take legal action against people who suggested he was under the influence of alcohol during a speech at the weekend. He has also taken both a breathalyser and blood test in an effort to prove his sobriety.

Among those it is believed the minister is planning to sue are two opposition politicians, an opposition-linked journalist, as well as a former political ally.

The controversy began on Saturday, when Kierwiński gave a speech thanking firefighters for their service. Many observers pointed out that the way the minister spoke – with many pauses and unclear articulation of words – made it sound like he was drunk.

However, Kierwiński strenuously denied the accusations, blaming technical problems with sound equipment and the acoustics of the venue for the way his speech sounded to viewers. In interviews with the media shortly after the speech, he could be heard speaking in a normal manner.

“There was terrible reverberation from the microphone,” said the minister. “Clearly there was some kind of equipment failure.”

In a later interview with news website Onet, Kierwiński said it was unimaginable to think he could turn up drunk to “a ceremony attended by 150 people, including the most important people in the country”. Among those present were President Andrzej Duda and the speaker of parliament, Szymon Hołownia.

In an effort to clear his name, Kierwiński later on Saturday shared a photograph of the results of a breathalyser test he said he had voluntarily taken at a police station after the speech. It showed he had no alcohol at all in his system.

On Monday, Kierwiński told broadcaster Radio Zet that, after taking the breathalyser, he also went to a hospital to have his blood tested.

He claimed that this also showed no alcohol in his system, though in this case he did not publicly show the results of the test. But he said he would use them as evidence in court against “those who had lied and insinuated” about him.

The previous day, Kierwiński had announced on social media that he would be taking legal action against those who had suggested he was drunk.

“The people who were and are behind the slander of my good name will bear the legal consequences of these hateful actions,” wrote the minister. “I will keep you informed about the next steps.”

Kierwiński has not yet named who he would sue, but said it would be “around five people”. In an interview with Onet, he indicated that this could include politicians from Law and Justice (PiS), the main opposition party.

Rzeczpospolita, a leading newspaper, reported unofficially that the targets would include Samuel Pereira, a media figure supportive of PiS, and opposition politicians Jacek Ozdoba and Stanisław Tyszka.

Pereira has made a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter) suggesting that Kierwiński was drunk during the speech. He also claimed that it would be easy to fake the breathalyser test results shared by Kierwiński as the name of the person supposedly taking it can be added by hand after the result is printed.

Ozdoba, meanwhile, held a press briefing on Sunday and, referring to Protasiewicz’s words, called on the media to investigate the issue “so that Poles know whether we have a government that is governing, or whether we are dealing with a regular party”.

“It is far from funny…if we realise that we are talking about the interior minister,” said Ozdoba. “This is not a comedy, this is an embarrassing script that [Prime Minister] Donald Tusk’s team is writing for us.”

Rzeczpospolita also claims that Kierwiński will seek to sue Jacek Protasiewicz, a former political ally, who wrote on X that the interior minister was “drunk as a skunk” during his speech and that “the talk about technical problems is bullshit for little people”.

Protasiewicz himself recently drew controversy for a series of vulgar tweets aimed at other politicians and journalists, which many believed may have been written under the influence of alcohol.

As a result, Protasiewicz was fired by Tusk from his position as deputy governor of Lower Silesia province. Speaking to Radio Zet today, Kierwiński pointed to Protasiewicz’s evident “problems” and accused him of “simply [telling] lies”.

Kierwiński is due soon to step down as interior minister, only a few months after taking up the position, in order to stand for election to the European Parliament next month.

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Main image credit: MSWiA (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.