Poland’s ruling party plans to ‘repolonise’ media if re-elected

Poland’s Law and Justice party will aim to “repolonise” the country’s private media if it wins elections this year, according to deputy prime minister, Jaroslaw Gowin.

The ruling party has long argued that Poland’s media landscape — in which German and US groups have a prominent role — needs reform, claiming foreign participants have an outsized influence over Polish public debate.

However, opposition politicians and journalists in the independent media fear a move to push out foreign owners would be an attempt to silence critical voices. They claim that the main state broadcaster has been reduced to a pro-government cheerleader since Law and Justice came to power nearly four years ago.

Speaking at a conference in Kartuzy in north-west Poland on Wednesday, Mr Gowin said a “self-respecting state and a self-respecting nation” could not allow a situation in which the majority of the media was “in foreign hands”. He said addressing the issue would be a “task” for Law and Justice if it wins parliamentary elections in the autumn.

“If I as a Pole was . . . the owner of a newspaper published in France, I . . . would concentrate on selling as many copies as possible so that business grew. But if there was a conflict of interest between Poland and France, I as a Polish patriot would obviously ensure that the paper I owned presented the Polish point of view,” he said.

“Why should we assume that German owners are worse patriots that we are? They are also patriots, but German patriots. And if there is a conflict of interest between Poland and Germany, those newspapers represent the German point of view.”

Law and Justice has regularly clashed with foreign-owned media groups, such as TVN, Poland’s main independent broadcaster, which is owned by the US group Discovery, and Newsweek, the magazine owned by Germany’s Axel Springer. It has also funnelled advertising towards pro-government media groups.

The party’s stance has provoked concern in Brussels, and set Warsaw at loggerheads with Washington, which Law and Justice has otherwise courted assiduously.

In 2017, the US Department of State criticised a decision by Poland’s state media regulator to fine TVN for its coverage of a political stand-off in 2016, which had itself been triggered by an attempt by Law and Justice to restrict journalists’ parliamentary access. Law and Justice later backed down.

Last year, the US ambassador, Georgette Mosbacher, wrote a blistering letter to Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, criticising the harassment by Polish officials of journalists from TVN who had been investigating a group of Polish neo-Nazis.

Some Polish journalists fear the so-called repolonisation of the media could see the country go the same way as Hungary — where critical media outlets have closed — a country Law and Justice’s founder Jaroslaw Kaczynski has cited as a model. Pro-government Hungarian groups have also merged under an umbrella venture run by a businessman with links to nationalist prime minister Viktor Orban.

“Repolonising the media is not about making freedom of speech stronger, it’s about fighting with a political enemy, and [the government] basically see the [independent] media as a political enemy,” said Marek Tejchman, deputy editor of Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, a centrist daily.

“This is a very challenging situation for editorial decisions. How long are you going to describe the situation in a calm way? It’s like a frog being boiled. You don’t really know . . . when you should start to scream.”