Protesters block Polish parliament

WARSAW — Poland’s long-running political crisis took a dramatic turn late Friday in Warsaw, with the action playing out live on television screens in prime time.

Anti-government demonstrators blocked access to the parliament buildings and opposition MPs staged their own protest inside after the ruling party pushed through the annual budget in a vote that excluded the opposition.

Demonstrators were gathering again in front of parliament on Saturday morning, while police protected the building. A larger protest rally was planned for noon outside the residence of Polish President Andrzej Duda.

The crisis started when the ruling Law and Justice party pushed through rules earlier this week that limited journalists’ access to the parliament buildings. The government said the reporters’ presence made for a chaotic work environment.

Polish journalists have long had the run of the parliament building, conducting interviews in the building’s main hallways and easily interacting with MPs. Their presence has also led to embarrassments, with reporters filming MPs munching sandwiches in the debating chamber, sleeping in hallways or showing up for work drunk.

The opposition and most of the press were strongly opposed to the new rules, and opposition MPs blocked access to the podium in the main debating chamber of parliament on Friday.

In response, the speaker of parliament called for a meeting in a separate room. There he said that a quorum of 237 MPs had shown up. While police blocked access to the hall for opposition MPs, the government adopted the budget — the most important bill of the year —by a show of hands, It also passed another bill slashing benefits for pensioners who had served in the communist-era secret services.

The opposition insisted that the budget vote was illegal.

“We have no evidence that there was a quorum. Speaker [Marek] Kuchciński was not in control of the voting. There was no electronic counting,” Sławomir Neumann, parliamentary leader of the opposition Civic Platform party, told reporters.

Law and Justice insisted nothing was wrong.

“There was a quorum. The budget was legally adopted,” said Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of Law and Justice and de facto the leader of Poland.

Law and Justice won the presidency and a majority in parliamentary in elections last year. Since then, it has taken a firm grip on the public media, purged the leadership of state controlled companies, and hobbled the country’s top constitutional court.

The party argues it is acting to bring down a web of corruption holding the country back. Its actions have sparked growing domestic protests and put Poland at odds with the European Commission, which has launched an unprecedented procedure against Warsaw for violating the bloc’s democratic norms.