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After their arrest in the presidential palace, two convicted members of the national-conservative PiS ended up in prison.

Former Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski and his State Secretary Maciej Wasik have been taken to the penitentiary, the police in Warsaw announced late Tuesday evening on platform X (formerly Twitter). A group of PiS parliamentarians, including party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, gathered overnight in front of the prison in Warsaw’s Grochow district. He described Kaminski and Wasik as “political prisoners” and unsuccessfully demanded entry to the prison.

The case of the two politicians led to an escalation of the conflict between the new center-left government of Donald Tusk and the camp of the national-conservative PiS on Tuesday. Since then, the EU and NATO country Poland has been on the brink of a national crisis.

President Andrzej Duda, from the PiS, received Kaminski and Wasik at the presidential palace on Tuesday while police were taking them to prison. After several hours in the palace, the PiS politicians were finally arrested there.

Kaminski and Wasik were sentenced on appeal by a district court in Warsaw in December to two years in prison for abuse of office and were due to begin their sentences. Duda granted the two pardons after an initial trial in 2015. However, the Supreme Court declared this pardon unlawful, because the professional proceedings were still ongoing at that time. Duda had emphasized several times that in his opinion the pardon remained applicable. (saw/sda/dpa)