MP Artur Debski. Photo: arturdebski.pl
A window was broken before police arrived and dispersed the demonstrators, who were shouting anti-communist slogans.
“Officers approached the group to ask the protesters to leave the hotel grounds, and they did,” police spokesperson Justyna Blaszczyk told Polish Radio.
The incident marks the third of its kind over the last four weeks, echoing the disruption of lectures at the University of Warsaw and the Radom Academy of Social and Technical Sciences.
Yesterday's incident involved a meeting of Europe Plus, the new centre-left initiative of former president Aleksander Kwasniewski and Janusz Palikot, leader of the anti-clerical Palikot's Movement.
Kwasniewski and Palikot are in the process of creating a list of Polish candidates who want to take part in the 2014 elections to the European Parliament.
Artur Debski, an MP for Palikot's Movement, was among those present at the Sandomierz meeting, which had drawn about 70 local members of the public before the protesters arrived.
“I do not know what organization they [the protesters] represented. They were young, masked men in shirts with slogans generally associated with nationalistic organizations,” he said.
Meanwhile, Professor Wieslaw Banys, chairman of the Conference of Rectors of Academic Schools in Poland (KRASP), has made the first official statement about the series of disturbances at academic institutions.
His statement comes in the wake of the cancellation of a lecture on Friday by prominent sociologist Professor Jan Hartman at the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, amid fears of disruption by nationalists. The theme of the lecture was anti-clericalism.
“University authorities should not give in to pressure by communities that are trying to impose their point of view, breaking academic values,” he wrote in an open letter, as cited by the Polish Press Agency (PAP).
“Do not cancel lectures,” Banys stressed, reasoning that cancellations would only amount to “a victory” for the protesters. (nh)