The new Polish government has gutted the top management of public television, making good on a campaign promise to reform a broadcaster that functioned as a mouthpiece of its rightwing populist predecessor, but also prompting criticism of their methods from some quarters.
The government led by prime minister, Donald Tusk, was sworn into office last Wednesday. It has promised to launch an ambitious programme to reverse the damage done to rule of law in the country during eight years of government by the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party.
Under PiS, state media was accused of promoting the party’s policies and launched vicious, personal attacks on opposition figures, and Tusk in particular. “We will need exactly 24 hours to turn the PiS TV back into public TV. Take my word for it,” Tusk said during a campaign rally in early October.
In the end, it has taken his government a week. On Tuesday, the new parliament adopted a resolution calling for the restoration of “impartiality and reliability of the public media”. After the resolution, the new culture minister, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, announced that the chairs and boards of state television, news and radio had all been removed.
The vote prompted PiS lawmakers to stage a protest outside the headquarters of TVP, the state broadcaster. “There is no democracy without media pluralism or strong anti-government media, and in Poland these are the public media,” the PiS leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, told reporters at the entrance of the state television building on Tuesday evening, promising that the protest would go on indefinitely.
The TVP 24-hour news service’s regular broadcast was suspended on Wednesday, with only the television logo visible on TV screens.
At one point on Wednesday, an MP from Tusk’s Civic Coalition (KO) posted a video from parliament showing a rightwing MP with a reporter waiting for a live connection to the TVP news channel, while the channel was showing a documentary about polar bears.
“This is clearly an attack on the free media; it is a violation of the law,” said the former PiS culture minister Piotr Gliński.
The sudden concern for freedom of speech from PiS politicians prompted wry amusement and inspired numerous memes. However, some questioned the legality of the moves, and cautioned that by acting in such a swift way, the Tusk government risked simply creating its own politicised public television network to replace the old one.
Dominika Bychawska-Siniarska, a lawyer and human rights advocate, said: “This kind of political takeover seems to recur every four or eight years following elections. My concern is that after this takeover, there may not be sufficient political motivation to continue with essential reforms in public broadcasting laws, vital to ensure that the national broadcaster remains independent of political influence.”
The debate around public television shows how Tusk will have difficult choices to make as he attempts to enact a radical reform programme. PiS are still a vocal, large opposition voice in parliament, and the party ally Andrzej Duda remains president until 2025 and has veto powers. This leaves the government with a choice of either scaling down or delaying its ambitions, or finding creative legal ways to enact them.
Stanley Bill, a professor of Polish studies at the University of Cambridge, said the government had used a “legal loophole” to enact the changes. He called the criticism from PiS politicians “hypocrisy on a staggering scale”, given how the party had curtailed free media while in power, but said the move was also problematic.
“It looks like a continuation of PiS’s modus operandi of executive ‘decisionism’ at the blurry borders of legality,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.