Freedom of the press in Poland: “This law is doubly hideous”

The coalition has broken down and yet the Polish government has managed to get a highly controversial media law through parliament. Only briefly did it look as if the opposition could delay the project.

For a moment yesterday evening it looked as if the Polish opposition had inflicted the first major defeat on the government camp since the PiS government took office. Standing their MPs cheered, while the government bank around PiS boss Jaroslaw Kaczynski seemed paralyzed by shock. What happened?

The head of the conservative PSL party, Wladyslaw Kosniak-Kamysz, had cunningly requested that the plenary session be postponed, with a view to some new advances slipped into the agenda by the opposition, for example on corona policy. The health minister must first prepare for it, Kosniak-Kamysz said innocently, everything must be careful, which is why parliament should continue to deliberate at the beginning of September.

What hardly anyone had expected: A Sejm majority voted for the postponement, even before the vote on the new media law, which the PiS wanted to enforce on the bend and break and for which it had even risked breaking with a junior partner.

Victory frenzy of short duration

But the opposition’s frenzy of victory should not last long. The first rumors quickly became a certainty: PiS had the vote repeated, three MPs from the right-wing protest party Kukiz 15 admitted a “mistake” and now voted against the adjournment.

The lawyer and rule of law activist Michal Wawrykiewicz was not alone in his assessment that the parliamentary leadership had broken the law by calling the second vote: “The repeated vote in a situation in which the ruling party has clearly lost is a clear violation of the regulations and can be an official crime, because there were no reasons at all for repetition. All of this is legal barbarism. “

“It destroys free media”

Nonetheless, the way was now clear for the vote on broadcasting law, the amendment of which could cost the large, non-governmental private broadcaster TVN the broadcast license, unless the owner, the US company Discovery, surrenders the majority.

Observers in Warsaw are astonished that PiS goes so far as to jeopardize relations with the United States. PSL boss Kosniak-Kamysz said in the debate: “Whenever it seems worse or more damaging, it turns out it can be done. This law is doubly hideous: it destroys free media and ruins relations with our most important allies . “

“We know exactly why you are doing this”

Previously, the author of the amendment, the PiS politician Marek Suski, had defended the procedure under “shame” shouts. This law is “nothing new” because there is already a regulation that limits the share for media companies from outside the European Economic Area to 49 percent of the capital. “We’re not changing anything, the amendment just wants to make regulations more precise so that they can no longer be circumvented.”

For example via European subsidiaries such as TVN – the media regulator has so far turned a blind eye here, and the USA is actually not considered a hostile power against which the law is officially directed. Window dressing, complained in parliament Borys Budka from the liberal citizens’ platform. “We know exactly why you are doing this. You are afraid of being watched over your fingers. You have taken over the public prosecutor’s office, the Sejm, all state institutions, in order to complete this system, you now want to take over the media. “

But the law is not yet in sackcloth. The Senate can still reject it, and formally more defectors are needed to overrule the House of Lords. Then – unlike yesterday evening – an absolute and not a simple majority is required.