2023-12-21 14:20:09
A week after consummating the change in power of Polandthe prime minister’s pro-European bloc Donald Tusk has already experienced a tough encounter with the ultraconservative forces who occupied power for eight years and especially with the president, Andrzej Duda, originating from those ranks. The reason has been the first step taken by Tusk to dismantle the media landscape, controlled by the now opposition party Law and Justice (PiS), dismissing the leaders of the public television TVP, the PAP news agency and the state radio RP.
This decision, carried out on Wednesday by the Ministry of Culture, was followed by a symbolic rally in solidarity format in front of the TVP headquarters by PiS deputies, including the party leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Some of the concentrates spent the night in the facilities. More serious for Tusk’s plans were the accusations leveled by Duda at the new Government of “violating the Constitution” and taking the media landscape to “anarchy“.
It is just an appetizer of the obstacles that the current prime minister will foreseeably encounter in his goal of returning Poland to the path of democratic structures, embodied in the 100 point plan with which he was invested in Parliament (Sejm). It is not only an abstract objective, but the unlocking of the recovery funds post-pandemic that has kept Brussels held back for years. Tusk, leader of the liberal Civic Platform (PO), succeeded in taking over power backed by two other pro-European alliances, the Third Way and the leftist Lewica.
The complex cohabitation between rivals
The restructuring of public mediaconverted by PiS into platforms at its service, is one of the priority points, as is the revocation of the reform of the judiciary promoted under the leadership of Kaczynski’s party. The new Executive has already begun to work on this objective, another key point in continuous confrontation with the European Commission (EC) that marked the period of PiS dominance. The ultra-conservative reform violated the principle of the independence of the judiciary, according to Brussels.
It took Tusk two months to succeed in his investiture, since Duda first entrusted the formation of the new Government to the then Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, from PiS. The president argued that PiS was the force with the most votes, despite the fact that it was clear that it would be a failed attempt because it did not have the majority or the allies it needed.
Tusk’s bloc has a solid majority of 248 seats out of the total 460 seats in the Sejm, whose presidency he holds Szymon Holownia, leader of one of the formations of the centrist Third Way, his main ally. But even this situation does not guarantee that he can carry out all his goals: it is up to Duda to endorse and sign most of the laws emanating from Parliament. President Duda came to office in 2015 as a PiS candidate, although he formally left militancy when he assumed the head of state. The next presidential election is scheduled for 2025. Until then, at least, Tusk will have the difficult task of cohabit with doubt
How to clean a media device
Tusk made clear his purpose of “cleansing” the public media landscape. In addition to the dismissal of the top leaders of the radio and television station and the news agency considered “subservient” to PiS, the liberal prime minister has announced that there will be no budget allocation for TVP next year. Something described as “indecent” by Duda, who accuses the new parliamentary majority of carrying out laws ignoring the Polish Constitution.
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The symbolic occupation of the public television headquarters was followed this Thursday by a de facto disconnection from TVP, which stopped broadcasting all its programs and showed a still image with its logo on its screen.
The hostility of the public entity towards the now prime minister has gone beyond the political. In the last general elections, he criticized the then opposition leader by incessantly reproducing the epithets of the PiS, which accused him of having been, during his previous period in power, between 2007 and 2014, a “russian agent“and having then gone on to”faithful servant” of Brusselsfor his period at the head of the European Council, from 2014 to 2019. The dismissal of the radio and television leadership has been accompanied by the dismissal of hundreds of journalistsas well as the opening of a file for alleged bad management y abuse of power.
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