The new Polish government’s move to liquidate its state broadcaster represents a “very important story” that is not being discussed enough by European outlets, Nigel Farage has said.
“What astonishes me is how little coverage this has had in the mainstream media,” Mr Farage said on his GB News show yesterday. Donald Tusk, the former European Council president who is now Poland’s Prime Minister, was accused of “the destruction of democracy” after he took control of the country’s state media and removed it from the air.
Mr Farage was speaking to a visibly furious Dominik Tarczyński, a member of the European Parliament for the recently-ousted right-wing populist Law and Justice (PiS) party. Mr Tarczyński said: “We have to protest, we have to react, we have to shout and scream about what is going on.”
“We are not a banana republic,” he added. “No one would expect that in this beautiful European Union full of beautiful words about freedom of speech, about democracy, about the rule of law and the rest of it, that Donald Tusk, a golden child of the Brussels elite, would do what he did. It is unspeakable.”
The decision by Mr Tusk to liquidate state media came as part of the new coalition’s pledge to restore impartiality. The PiS part had been accused of making the government’s media a “mouthpiece” for the party.
Speaking on GB News, Mr Tarczyński denied accusations that when his party had been in power, that it had “stuffed the organisation with your own supporters.”
He added of Mr Tusk: “He cut off the signal, which never ever happened in the history of Poland apart from martial law times during communism.”
Mr Tusk last week returned to the post he had previously occupied from 2007 to 2014. He has been accused by PiS of circumventing normal parliamentary procedure when dismantling the state media.
The nationalist party blasted the move as illegal and has responded with sit-in protests. The decision follows a move by Andrzej Duda, the president of Poland and a PiS ally, to veto the new government’s three billion zloty (£603million) spending proposals for public media financing.
Mr Duda justified his veto saying the new government’s installation of new management had violated the country’s constitution.
Beata Szydlo, an MEP and herself a former Polish PM between 2015 and 2017, accused Mr Tusk of “an illegal takeover” of Telewizja Polska (TVP).
She told Express.co.uk: “In addition to the attempted illegal takeover of public media, the very mode of using the resolution as a basis for government action raises the risk that Tusk will try to act the same way in other matters. This is the destruction of democracy in Poland.”
Last week, Culture Minister Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz took the state 24-hour news channel, TVP Info, off air and sacked the boards of the public media. Roman Giertych, a lawyer who has represented Mr Tusk and is now an MP for his party, said the culture minister’s decision “ends the legal dispute” and allows the government to appoint liquidators who can conduct restructuring.
The announcement was described as an “admission of defeat” by the head of President Duda’s office, Marcin Mastalerek. He said they chose this path because they could not find a legal way to change the public media management boards.
Daily Express political editor David Maddox argued Mr Tusk could be laying the blueprint for Sir Keir Starmer with his control of the media.
He wrote: “Labour has always argued that the extensive Leveson reforms did not go far enough and have promised to bring in what is termed as ‘Leveson 2’.
“Labour supported the plan to bankrupt media outlets by forcing them to pay for every legal case against them even if the outlet had done nothing wrong.”
