Poland is mourning six dead in the middle of one of Europe's most beloved squares, and the political reflex is already forming: he was disturbed, he was alone, he killed his own family first, so don't make it about politics. That reflex should be refused.
The facts are still preliminary. The suspect is in critical condition and has not been questioned. But prosecutors have classified this as terrorism, and the interior minister says early findings point to far-right ideology. That matters, because the label is the test of whether a country applies its definitions evenly. When the attacker has a foreign name or a Muslim background, "terrorism" arrives within hours and nobody tells us to wait for a psychiatric evaluation. When he is a young Polish man marinated in the movement's own mythology, the sudden appeal to complexity and mental health is a choice about whose violence counts as political. Warsaw's prosecutors appear, so far, to be making the right choice. They should hold to it.
The "lone wolf" and "troubled man" framings are false opposites. Troubled young men are exactly who radical ideologies recruit, because those ideologies hand them a story: your pain is not private, it was done to you by enemies, and violence is how you answer. Ideology does not create the despair, but it chooses the target. That a man who may have killed his mother, father and sister also went to a crowded public square is no argument against an ideological motive. It shows how thoroughly contempt can consume everyone in its path, including the people closest to him.
The harder question is about the political environment that produced a 24-year-old like this. Poland's young men have been drifting hard right. In the 2025 presidential election, the under-30 vote leaned heavily toward Konfederacja's Sławomir Mentzen and the openly extreme Grzegorz Braun, who has made a career of conspiracy theory, antisemitic innuendo and anti-Ukrainian agitation. Braun's stunts, including the menorah-extinguishing episode in the Sejm, were treated by too many people as spectacle rather than as a warning. A political culture that spends years rehearsing the idea that migrants, Ukrainians, Jews, "gender ideology" and Brussels are existential threats should not be shocked when one man takes it literally.
Nor can the Left let its own side off. Donald Tusk's government answered the far right's momentum by adopting its vocabulary on migration, suspending asylum rights at the Belarusian border and talking tough to prove it was listening. That may be electoral arithmetic, but it concedes the premise that fear of outsiders is the natural center of Polish politics. You cannot spend years validating the grievance and then act astonished when the radical fringe claims to be the only honest messenger. The mainstream liberal answer to the far right has too often been imitation with better grammar. It has not worked. It has not shrunk the far right; it has made its language ordinary.
There are also questions the government owes the public. How did this man move through the world unnoticed? Were there warning signs online, at school, or in his family that nobody was equipped to act on? How did he get the weapon? I will not speculate about answers I don't have, but a state that responds to terrorism only after the funerals has little to be proud of. Investigating the networks, forums and influencers that feed young men this material is a legitimate public-safety task, and it will be called censorship by the people who profit from it.
Grief should come first, and nobody should be fitted into a political script over the bodies of the dead. But grief is no reason to be vague. If a man was radicalized by far-right ideology and shot sixteen... strangers in a public square, then Poland must be willing to say so plainly, and to ask which parts of its political life made that ideology feel normal.
