Janusz Waluś has become a mascot of the far right and has a political base in Poland
- Janusz Waluś, who murdered Chris Hani in 1993, was deported to Poland in December 2024.
- He has become a hero of Poland's far right and football ultras. His icon is holocaust denialist Grzegorz Braun, who leads the far-right, pro-Russia KKP party.
- A Polish newspaper reported that Waluś may stand for Parliament in 2027.
- His daughter Ewa has cut off contact with him. "I don't want my daughter to grow up, and then live as an adult woman in Mr Braun's country. It would not be a country for women, for minorities, or for people who value freedom," she said.
Ewa Waluś was without a father for almost her entire life. Her father Janusz Waluś left for South Africa in 1981, when she was three, to join a family business. She and her mother were meant to follow. But two months later Poland's Communist authorities imposed martial law to crush the Solidarity movement, and the move became impossible.
Ewa saw her father in South Africa in 1983 and again in 1987. Waluś was living with another woman. She saw him for the third time when he visited Poland in 1992. She begged him to stay a few more days for her 14th birthday. He refused.
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Just over six months later, on Easter Saturday, 10 April 1993, Ewa and her mother were watching television when they heard that a Polish immigrant, Janusz Waluś, had shot dead Chris Hani, general secretary of the South African Communist Party.
"I had absolutely no idea who Chris Hani was," she later told TOK FM radio. "For a long time I thought it might still be a mistake."
It was not. She would not see her father again for 31 years.
At school, Ewa had to endure the stigma of being a murderer's daughter.
When Waluś was convicted of killing one of South Africa's most popular political leaders and was sentenced to death, Ewa decided that her father "had got what he deserved", she later told Onet.
"I certainly didn't want them to kill him. I remember that paralysing fear. But it was obvious to me that you have to pay for something like that."
After the death penalty was abolished, Waluś's sentence became life imprisonment.
Ewa studied law and later worked as a journalist, in public relations and as a museum educator. For three decades she did not visit her father. He believed it could be too dangerous for her. Their letters were in English, which she learnt partly so she could correspond with him (until the 1990s, correspondence with prisoners had to be in English).
Waluś became eligible for parole in 2005, but repeated attempts to secure his release failed.
Ewa nevertheless came to believe that he should be released. She wrote to Poland's president, approached MPs, spoke to the media and raised money for his lawyers. She accepted help from nationalist activists even though her own politics were very different. She was taking part in protests against the right-wing government and marches organised by the liberal opposition.
"Everyone should be equal before the law," she told Onet. "Compared with people who had committed horrific murders, I thought my father could no longer be dangerous. I believe people should be given a second chance."
In November 2022 South Africa's Constitutional Court ordered Waluś's release. He left custody on 7 December after 29 years behind bars and spent the next two years on parole.
"We lost our fathers on the same day"
Lindiwe Hani, one of Chris Hani's three daughters, had been visiting Waluś in prison from 2016 in an effort to confront the trauma of her father's murder.
Later, Ewa and Lindiwe also spoke several times.
"Lindiwe Hani told me once we lost our fathers on the same day. It was beautiful and I am grateful to her for that," Ewa told eNCA in 2024.
In April 2024, Ewa flew to South Africa for a month. For the first time, she and her father spoke seriously about the murder that had shaped her life.
At 45, she was in many ways only beginning to know her 71-year-old father.
She did not like what she found. His views had not changed, and she began to fear that he "might have further radicalised".
When they discussed his return to Poland, Waluś told her he already had a plan. Ewa told Onet she had warned him that if he entered far-right politics, he would lose her and his granddaughter.
Return to Poland
Back in Poland, she nevertheless organised his return.
"Everything had been arranged: security, flights, very good cooperation with the consul," she later recalled to Onet. "Then suddenly Mr Braun's assistant called and said they wanted to fly over to collect my father."
Grzegorz Braun is a Polish member of the European Parliament and leader of the far-right Confederation of the Polish Crown, or KKP.
Ewa protested. The next day, she discovered that her father himself had invited Braun.
"I felt as though someone had slapped me in the face. I decided that if a politician was more important, I wasn't going [to meet him on arrival]," she told Onet.
She told journalist Dorota Wysocka-Schnepf on her YouTube channel, "I think the overriding reason is probably that Grzegorz Braun is, after all, closer to my father than I am."
On 6 December 2024, South Africa deported Waluś. When he walked into the arrivals hall at Warsaw airport the next morning, Braun was behind him.
A month later, Waluś gave his first interview. "What I did, I still consider necessary," he said.
Asked what he would do differently, he replied: "I would prepare it better."
A second interview, lasting more than two hours, on the popular online broadcaster Kanal̸ Zero caused a much bigger uproar.
Waluś said he regretted killing Hani as a father and husband, but not as a Communist. He continued to describe Hani as a terrorist responsible for innocent deaths.
He also admitted that he and Conservative Party politician Clive Derby-Lewis had hoped the assassination would escalate the conflict and reverse South Africa's political transition.
His meetings with Lindiwe Hani, he conceded, had also had an instrumental purpose: they might help him obtain parole. When interviewer Krzysztof Stanowski suggested this was cynical, Waluś agreed.
He said, "The white race is, in a certain sense, more predisposed to proper administration." He insisted that the Conservative Party had wanted racial separation rather than apartheid as such.
Waluś denied being racist, but at a meeting with supporters, he said black people have an average IQ of 70.
By the end of the Kanal̸ Zero interview, even his central justification for killing Hani - that Hani was a "terrorist" - began to unravel. Pressed by Stanowski, Waluś conceded that had he not been arrested, he might have gone on to kill other political opponents.
Building a base
Waluś then embarked on a media tour, appearing on podcasts, launching his own YouTube channel and website and asking supporters for financial help.
He also began travelling around Poland at the invitation of Braun's party, other far-right organisations and football supporters.
In these appearances, he has called Nelson Mandela "nothing but a terrorist" who killed innocent people through bomb attacks and said Mandela should have received the death penalty.
He speaks about Orania, the "genocide of white people in South Africa", and what he describes as the country's collapse. He presents South Africa as a warning to Europe of what will happen unless it closes itself off to immigration.
At one meeting, a participant asked: "Do you miss Africa?"
"Yes," Waluś replied. "But - forgive me, because I don't like swearing - it's like missing a girl who turned into a whore."
Russian connection
Braun, whom Ewa Waluś calls her father's "idol", has built his career on provocation. He has been charged with using a fire extinguisher on a Hanukkah menorah in Parliament, with destroying equipment during a Holocaust lecture and with Holocaust denial for saying the Auschwitz gas chambers were "fake". He has claimed that "Jews" built a backup command centre for Israel beneath Poland's largest water park.
Other criminal charges include manhandling a doctor who had served as health minister during the pandemic, destroying Christmas decorations in a courthouse - the tree was decorated with, among other things, LGBT symbols and Ukrainian and EU flags -- and stealing Ukrainian and EU flags from public buildings. Prosecutors are also seeking to charge him with assaulting a doctor who performs legal abortions.
Since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, Braun has portrayed Ukrainian refugees as a threat and promoted conspiracy theories about a future "Ukropol" - a Poland supposedly dominated by Ukrainians. He has argued that Poland should "come to an understanding" with Russia. He has refused to call Vladimir Putin a criminal.
Russian and pro-Russian disinformation networks promote many of the same anti-Ukrainian themes. Reports by the fact-checking organisation Demagog and the Institute of Media Monitoring have placed Braun and KKP among the most influential accounts spreading anti-Ukrainian content on Polish social media.
KKP is therefore unusual in Polish politics: an openly pro-Russian force with meaningful electoral support. That matters because Poland's next parliamentary election is due in autumn 2027 and KKP is polling between 7% and 11%.
Current polling suggests the liberal governing coalition may struggle to retain its majority. A right-wing government led by parties like Law and Justice (PiS) would likely need KKP's MPs to reach a majority.
PiS leader Jarosl̸aw Kaczyński says he will not cooperate with Braun, whom he has called "very dangerous" while referring to "Russian connections". Political scientist and historian Antoni Dudek has gone further, saying that Braun and the KPP lead Putin's fifth column in Poland.
The atmosphere is sharpened by the war next door. Russian drones and missiles have entered Polish airspace, while Polish authorities have blamed Russian intelligence for sabotage, including arson and attacks on railway infrastructure.
In August 2025, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Poland must "be ready for various scenarios in two years".
Football fan base
Waluś did not create his Polish cult after coming home. He came home to one built while he was still in prison.
Braun helped popularise the description of him as "the last Cursed Soldier", borrowing the name given in Poland to members of the post-war anti-Communist underground.
The myth became particularly strong among football ultras, a scene that partly overlaps with the far right. In that world, Waluś was presented not primarily as a defender of apartheid, but as an uncompromising anti-Communist who had sacrificed himself for a righteous cause.
Supporters sent him Christmas cards and raised money for his lawyers and prison food.
In September 2025, Waluś went into the heart of Legia Warsaw ultras' stand to thank them. In November, he appeared at the same stadium with Braun. Pictures circulated of them with a supporter holding a scarf reading: "Death to the enemies of the homeland".
In March 2026, the two appeared together again at the National Stadium for Poland's match against Albania.
By then, Braun's political position had changed dramatically. A politician who had long operated on the political fringe had finished fourth in the 2025 presidential election with more than 6% of the vote. Waluś endorsed him.
KKP subsequently climbed in the polls. Yet beyond Braun, the party has few nationally recognisable figures.
Waluś has something most of them do not: a ready-made following among football ultras.
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MP candidacy speculation
In April, the influential daily Rzeczpospolita reported that Waluś was being considered as one of KKP's potential electoral vote-winners and that his candidacy for Parliament was likely.
A well-placed source who did not wish to be named told this reporter that Waluś isn't actively seeking a seat in Parliament, but Braun would like him to run.
They said, "They have had some initial discussions with him about standing for election. If they ask him, he won't say no. But it's still too early to say. Such decisions will be made next year."
We should know whether Waluś will run in early 2027.
Shortly before Waluś's departure, Lindiwe Hani asked him to promise that he would stay out of politics. By his own account, he refused.
Soon after his first interviews, Ewa began giving interviews of her own, warning Poles about her father.
"For many years, I fought for my father to have the right to return to his family," she told Onet.
"Now it turns out that this man may be dangerous to the country I love. I wanted to do good and perhaps I have done something very bad."
Gazeta Wyborcza reported in December 2025 that during his first year back in Poland, Waluś "found time for two brief, perfunctory meetings with his daughter".
Ewa, finally disillusioned with her father's behaviour, subsequently cut off contact with him.
"My father could end up in Parliament as a representative of a party that forms part of the governing coalition," she said.
"I don't want my daughter to grow up, and then live as an adult woman, in Mr Braun's country. It would not be a country for women, for minorities, or for people who value freedom. That's why I'm making it clear: I'm distancing myself from him. And I will defend democratic values, including for the sake of my child's future," she said.
According to Gazeta Wyborcza, Waluś tried to wish his granddaughter, whom he had never met, a happy 11th birthday. But, as her mother recounted, the girl "came over, leaned towards the [phone] speaker and said she wouldn't talk to a neo-Nazi".
The 2025 presidential election was narrowly won by Karol Nawrocki, who had himself been involved in Poland's football-ultra scene.
Could people from the political camp that backed the current president help Waluś into Parliament next year?
Even if he does not stand himself, the "last Cursed Soldier" could still mobilise football supporters behind particular candidates.
Current polling suggests the next election could be close enough for every vote to matter.
In Poland, anyone sentenced to prison for an intentional crime is barred from standing for election. But Waluś's murder conviction doesn't count because it was handed down by a South African court, not a Polish one, according to former electoral commission head Wojciech Hermeliński.
We sent a query to Waluś asking if he intends to stand for election. His reply will be added if and when received.
