Standoff at Presidential Palace Shows Poland's Right Won't Go Quietly

Poland's bumpy transition to a new government hit dramatic turbulence on Wednesday when a prominent hard-line minister in the former right-wing administration declared himself a "political prisoner" and announced he was going on a hunger strike to protest his arrest following conviction for abuse of power.

Seeking to avoid a two-year jail sentence handed down by a Warsaw court in December, the former minister, Mariusz Kaminski, took refuge from police on Tuesday in the palace of the Polish president, a close ally of the former conservative governing party, Law and Justice.

The resulting standoff between police officers loyal to the new government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a veteran centrist, and Law and Justice supporters escalated a disruptive campaign by the former governing party, defeated in an October election, to resist the transfer of power by casting the election winners as illegitimate usurpers intent on persecuting their rivals.

Tuesday's confrontation at the presidential palace ended peacefully late in the evening after police officers were allowed to enter the building. They took Mr. Kaminski, a former minister responsible for Poland's security services, into custody, along with a former aide, Maciej Wasik, who has also been convicted of abuse of power.

In statement issued from jail on Wednesday, Mr. Kaminski denounced his arrest as "an act of political revenge" and said: "Therefore, as a political prisoner, I am starting a hunger protest from the first day of my imprisonment."

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