How many Poles does it take to make a crowd?
That question divides the deeply polarized country as Poland’s government and its opponents bicker over how many people gathered in a central Warsaw street protest Saturday.
There’s no doubt the protest against the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) government was big. But how big?
The city — ruled by the opposition Civic Platform party— said that 240,000 people took part, making it the largest public gathering in decades.
The police estimate was a mere 45,000.
The city said it counted participants, including people who may have not been in the march for the whole length. The police estimated the number of people at the start and end points.
Polish public television, now strongly pro-government since a change of top management, had a reporter count participants using two ballpoint pens and a television monitor and came up with a count of 45,200.
— Exen (@Exen) May 8, 2016
One of its journalists, Małgorzata Walczak, said on air there might have been up to 200,000 marchers. She has been called in for a chat with management, according to the wirtualnemedia.pl portal.
Private television channels like TVN estimated there were about 100,000 people on the streets.
Still image via YouTube video/user mxstudiowadowice
Still image via YouTube video/user mxstudiowadowice
Meanwhile, a blogger whose Facebook photo is a Muppet and who identifies himself as having attended “Fartville” school, apparently did a much more precise count: 213,360 participants. The result immediately made the rounds of online news sites.
One credible source has the count at almost a quarter of a million | Facebook
A smaller Saturday counter-march by nationalists drew 4,500 people, according to police, while the city put the number 2,500.
The fight over numbers is deadly serious.
If the participants in the anti-government march are at the higher end, it show the opposition, led by the nonpartisan Committee for the Defense of Democracy, is able to galvanize enormous crowds against the PiS party government and the country’s deepening constitutional crisis.
Meanwhile, the government’s supporters are trying hard to call the demonstration an embarrassing flop.
The march was a “failure,” Interior Minister Mariusz Błaszczak told RMF radio. “There were supposed to be hundreds of thousands. A million people were supposed to come out onto the streets.”
Nationalists march across the Slasko-Dabrowski Bridge in Warsaw on Saturday | Leszek Szymanski/EPA
The inability to agree on how many people walked through the capital of the EU’s sixth-largest country is a sign of the deep conflict in Poland, wrote Michał Szułdrzyński, deputy editor of the Rzeczpospolita newspaper.
“The fight over the number of participants in Saturday’s KOD demonstration is essentially a fight over the legitimacy of the ruling PiS as well as the opposition forces,” he wrote.
Protesters in central Warsaw on Saturday | Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images