His condition is described as “very serious”.
Polish mayor Pawel Adamowicz was stabbed in the chest as he spoke at a charity fundraiser in Gdansk in front of hundreds of people on Sunday.
Paramedics resuscitated the 53-year-old at the scene before taking him to hospital.
According to RTÉ, a doctor working for the regional authorities, Jerzy Karpinski, described the mayor’s condition as “very serious”.
A video recording of the attack was posted on YouTube, and showed the attacker bursting onto the podium that Adamowicz was standing on.
After stabbing the mayor, the attacker seized the microphone and claimed to have been wrongly jailed by the previous centrist government of the Civic Platform (PO) and tortured. He went on to shout: “That’s why Adamowicz dies.”
He was quickly apprehended by security guards and was immediately arrested by police.
A Gdansk police spokesman said the detained man was a 27-year-old who lived in the city.
Interior Minister Joachim Brudzinski described the attack as “an incomprehensible act of barbarism”.
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