“We need a strong and efficient state so that we can feel safe, live in prosperity, and live in freedom and sovereignty, not so that our freedom is restricted,” President Karol Nawrocki said Wednesday during a ceremony on Piłsudski Square in Warsaw.

“Today, Nov. 11, on Independence Day, more than on any other day in the Polish calendar, we feel that we are a national community made up of freedom. We are built on a foundation of freedom that has carried us through the centuries and made us ready to fight for our independence, and that freedom often leads us to put a great deal of energy into building an independent Republic of Poland,” the president said.

In this context, Nawrocki said that Poland’s regaining of independence in 1918 was “the recovery of an instrument for the national community to decide about itself, an instrument in the form of a state.”

“The essence of every independent state is, on the one hand, ensuring the freedom and sovereignty of its citizens, and on the other, ensuring the security and prosperity of all citizens. It is not the state’s need to restrict the freedom and sovereignty of citizens. Poles do not need a strong and efficient state in order to restrict, under the cloak of concern, the freedom and sovereignty of the citizens of the Polish state,” Nawrocki said.

He stressed that “we need a strong and efficient state so that we can feel safe, live in prosperity, and live in freedom and sovereignty, not so that our freedom is restricted.”

“The Polish state was not created 108 years ago for that purpose, either, and it does not exist today so that political elites can claim the right to govern the citizens of the Republic against the will of the nation. Political elites are there (…) to carry out the will of the Polish nation and the Polish sovereign,” the president said. (PAP)