Walesa lambasts Solidarity protesters

photo - PR

“Although I feel like the father of these unruly children, this does not make me happy,” Walesa told commercial station Radio Zet on Wednesday.

As Donald Tusk's coalition government voted in favour of raising the retirement age to 67 on Friday, hundreds of Solidarity activists blocked parliament.

Photographs of MPs were burnt and an effigy of the prime minister was hanged.

“They have a right to hold such a demonstration, but not spitting, not fighting,” Walesa said.

“The demonstration should be in good form, not an arrest of the prime minister and the closure of parliament,” he said.

Walesa added that as far as the effigies were concerned, he himself would burn Piotr Duda, his current successor as leader of the Solidarity trade union.

The former president argued that Prime Minister Tusk was too conciliatory and should have taken more decisive action against the demonstrators.

“Enough of these games,” he said.

Nevertheless, tempers became frayed on both sides of the blockade during Friday's vote.

While demonstrators blocked the parliament building, MP Stefan Niesiolowski of Tusk's Civic Platform party shouted at a journalist affiliated with the opposition, pushing her camera aside after she tried to interview him.

Tusk has called on the MP to apologise to the journalist. (nh)