Also in attendance at Wednesday's event were Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, senior government ministers, including top diplomat Zbigniew Rau, and senior lawmakers, including lower house Speaker Elżbieta Witek, according to news outlets.
In a keynote speech to crowds and officials gathered at the Polish capital’s Castle Square to celebrate Constitution Day, President Andrzej Duda thanked “everyone who has worked for years to make Poland stronger” since the fall of communism in 1989, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
Duda stressed that “since 1989, Poland has been a free country.”
He stated: “As part of being Poland’s president, thanks to your choice, on many occasions every year I thank… everyone who fought for a free Poland down the generations, including the generation of my parents, the people of the ‘Solidarity’ movement, thanks to whom we regained freedom, sovereignty and independence in 1989.”
The president went on to say: “I would like to say thank you to everyone who has worked for years to make Poland stronger after it emerged from behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ in 1989 economically poor and… with an obsolete and often dilapidated industrial base.”
He noted that Poland at the same time “had a population of 38 million people, which is enormous by European standards,” as well as “an extraordinary location in the heart of Europe” and therefore “an exceptional potential for development that it has always had.”
Duda also thanked those who had sought “in a responsible way,” to make Poland “secure, as powerful as possible and as wealthy as possible,” by steering the country "towards NATO and the European Union."
He said: “I thank those who reformed Poland, who changed Poland, removing the bad residue from the years of subjugation, of dependence, from the big nightmare from the East, from the Soviet Union and… Russkiy mir.”
‘Poland must be strong’
The president stressed that “only a strong country can survive and exist here.”
He added that “a weak country will be subordinated to others, history makes it clear.”
Duda warned: “Either the next generations and their politicians… will ensure that Poland is strong, independent and truly sovereign, or it won’t be our Poland in fact, or a Poland ruled by others.”
‘Constitution of May 3, 1791 was a revolutionary document’
The president also hailed Poland’s landmark Constitution of May 3, 1791, which was enacted exactly 232 years ago, as “an extraordinary, revolutionary document of modern political thought.”
He told the gathering: “We take great pride in having had a constitution which essentially established constitutional monarchy in Poland, with the king exercising his authority in accordance with a constitution that referred to the nation as the sovereign.”
Duda noted that “the constitution lasted only a year” as Poland’s neighbours moved to carve up the country, fearful that such modern laws would make Poland “strong again” and would allow it “to regain its rightful place in the heart of Europe.”
Earlier in the day, the president, accompanied by First Lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda, marked Constitution Day by decorating outstanding Poles, including the composer and former culture minister Joanna Wnuk-Nazarowa, with the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state distinction, officials said.
The ceremony took place at Warsaw’s Royal Castle.
Poland’s Constitution Day
May 3 is a public holiday in Poland that celebrates a historic constitution the country’s legislators adopted on May 3, 1791.
Poles proudly point out that the progressive document was the first modern constitution in Europe and the second worldwide, after the American Constitution, which was created in 1787.
The pioneering Polish constitution is described by historians as one of the proudest achievements in Polish history, with many saying that the constitution’s provisions – if put into practice – would have changed the course of the nation’s history.
But reforms and liberties proposed in the document – including religious tolerance and the separation of powers – were viewed with suspicion in neighbouring countries, especially in light of the French Revolution raging at the time.
The Polish reforms were seen as a threat to the European status quo by Russia, Austria and Prussia, historians say, and the adoption of the constitution hastened the dismemberment of Poland by these countries.
After a series of partitions, Poland in 1795 lost its sovereignty for 123 years. It re-emerged as an independent state on November 11, 1918, the day World War I ended.
Poland marks Constitution Day on May 3, while November 11 is Independence Day, commemorating the anniversary of the restoration of Poland's sovereignty.
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Source: PAP, prezydent.pl, dorzeczy.pl, polskieradio24.pl