ECOCIDE

Garbage Dump Fire Heats Up Polish Politics Before Election



Wojciech Moskwa
Sun, July 23, 2023 

(Bloomberg) -- A fire raging in a garbage dump in western Poland has ignited a political blame game, three months before the country is due to hold a tightly contested election.

Opposition leader Donald Tusk said the government has overseen a surge in imports of trash into Poland, fueling the creation of illegal dumps. He said the “stench of corruption” was in the air near Zielona Gora, where a hall storing trash and chemicals caught fire on Saturday.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Tusk was using the incident to divide his compatriots and damage the government, while his environment minister blamed the incident on Tusk’s Civic Platform party for agreeing to allow trash imports when in power a decade ago.

“Disgusting,” Morawiecki said on his Twitter account about Tusk’s comments. “The joker from the Civic Platform - the Party of Fraudsters — even wants to use the fire for his black PR.”

Poland’s election is expected to be held in October, although a date hasn’t been announced. Opinion polls show support for the ruling Law & Justice party is just ahead of the Civic Platform, with both likely to need coalition partners to govern following the election. The government has been on the back foot over a cost-of-living crisis and struggles to gain European Union aid due to the bloc’s concerns over democratic backsliding, while the opposition has been trying to motivate its electorate by focusing on women’s rights as well as graft allegations against public officials.

There are about 7,000 cubic meters (247,200 cubic feet) of dangerous substances in the privately operated garbage dump in Zielona Gora, a city of about 140,000 located about 60 km (37 miles) from the German border, the news portal Interia.pl reported.

The government’s representative to the region where the dump is located said the fire is under control and poses no threat to residents. It should be fully extinguished within hours, Wladyslaw Dajczak said after a crisis-staff meeting on Sunday, according to public radio.

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