To Not Was Not a Scandal. It Was an Offer.

When a swastika appears in the Polish parliament, the easiest response is to speak about the brutalization of language or the collapse of civic standards. That is not enough. Konrad Berkowicz’s display in the Sejm on April 14, 2026, of an Israeli flag with a swastika in place of the Star of David, alongside his description of Israel as the “new Third Reich,” was not a loss of self-control. It was a political test. It asked a colder question: how far can the symbolic contamination of public life now be pushed in Poland while still producing visibility, applause, and electoral value? 

That is why this should not be read as an isolated scandal. Poland is no longer dealing with disconnected episodes. It is dealing with a sequence. In December 2023, Grzegorz Braun used a fire extinguisher to put out Hanukkah candles in parliament during a ceremony with members of the Jewish community. In January 2024, the Sejm removed his immunity, opening the way for prosecution. Yet the deeper lesson of that episode was not only that it happened. It was that it did not function as a terminal disgrace. The state reacted, but reaction did not become deterrence. 

The threshold then moved again. By 2025 Braun was publicly denying the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and in March 2026 the European Parliament stripped him of immunity in connection with Holocaust-denial allegations and other cases. Reporting around that decision also noted that his trial over earlier anti-Jewish incidents had already begun and that he used the courtroom itself as a stage for inflammatory rhetoric. This is not the behavior of a man who believes he has reached the edge of public tolerance. It is the behavior of a politician who believes the edge keeps moving. 

That moving edge is the real story. Official Poland condemns these episodes. Ministries issue statements. Speakers denounce them. Immunities are lifted. Prosecutors are notified. But the broader impression remains deeply corrosive: the state reacts, yet does not close. It begins procedures, yet rarely produces the kind of swift and unmistakable consequence that would reverse the political calculus. In a healthy polity, some gestures create such an immediate cost that imitators retreat. In Poland today, the opposite lesson risks being taught: cross the line, dominate the cycle, radicalize your image, and remain electorally usable. That is not strength. It is institutional hesitation. 

One must be precise. This is not an argument against legal procedure. Nor is it a demand that governments bypass courts whenever a gesture is morally filthy. The problem is subtler and more dangerous. The cumulative public meaning of these cases is one of incomplete closure. The Polish state appears able to condemn, but not to finish. And once a state repeatedly fails to convert condemnation into a visible cost, political predators learn from that failure far faster than legal systems can repair it.

This is where the struggle on the Polish right becomes essential. The issue is not only antisemitism as prejudice. It is antisemitism as a technology of political mobilization. On the radical right, anti-Jewish symbolism is no longer merely an expression of hatred. It is becoming a tool in the competition for attention, rank, and growth. The latest IBRiS poll for Polsat News, published on April 14, 2026, put Confederation at 15 percent and Braun’s Confederation of the Polish Crown at 8.2 percent. That is not fringe theater. That is a measurable constituency. 

Once that is understood, Berkowicz’s act becomes legible in a colder way. It was not aimed primarily at Israel. It was aimed at the domestic market. It said: we too can cross the threshold; we too can demonstrate that we have no brakes; we too can turn historical obscenity into political style. In that environment, the swastika no longer functions only as a sign of absolute disgrace. It is being tested as a political instrument, a badge of maximum provocation in a field where symbolic poison is converted into recognizability. That is why calling it merely a scandal is inadequate. It was an offer.

And offers are made only where someone expects demand.

This is also why the language of “brutalization” is too weak. Brutalization suggests that public speech is becoming rougher. What is happening is more specific. Poland is witnessing the political monetization of contamination. Jewish memory, the Holocaust, and the visual grammar of Nazism are being repurposed as raw material for domestic positioning. Not because every actor involved is ideologically coherent, and not because every voter embraces the full meaning of the symbol, but because the symbol now performs useful political work. It shocks. It brands. It sorts audiences. It tells one part of the electorate that the speaker is willing to go further than the timid.

That functional quality is what should alarm any serious observer. Democracies can survive isolated monsters more easily than they can survive the normalization of profitable monstrosity. The decisive danger is not that an extremist says something abhorrent. The decisive danger is that the abhorrent act is read by enough people as effective. Once that happens, the incentive structure changes. The next politician does not ask, “Is this too ugly?” He asks, “Did it work?”

Poland now gives off the increasingly troubling impression of a state that knows these acts are dangerous, yet fears truly finishing with them. Perhaps because it fears martyring the offenders. Perhaps because it fears strengthening their anti-system mythology. Perhaps because parts of the political class still hope that procedural management can contain what is no longer merely procedural. That last point is an inference, but it fits the visible pattern: repeated condemnation, delayed closure, persistent escalation. And politics reads hesitation as permission. 

Berkowicz did not invent the field into which he stepped. He exploited one already softened by years of under-closed escalation. Braun’s extinguishing of Hanukkah candles in parliament, his later Holocaust-denial rhetoric, his anti-Jewish performance in court, and now Berkowicz’s swastika in the Sejm all belong to one sequence. Each episode asks the same question: how far can the line be moved while still extracting gain? Each episode teaches the next actor that contamination may be politically rentable. 

That is the diagnosis Poland should now face without euphemism. This is not only a crisis of tone. It is a crisis of boundaries. Not only a problem of antisemitic speech, but of antisemitic functionality. Not only a matter of who hates Jews, but of who has learned that anti-Jewish symbolism can still be made to work inside electoral competition.

The swastika in the Sejm was not simply an antisemitic outrage. It was a market test conducted with one of the most contaminated symbols in modern history.

And the deeper scandal is not only that the test was performed.

It is that, in present-day Poland, someone could reasonably suspect that the returns might be positive.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)