Democracy in Poland is on the brink
This may be the final strike by the Polish government to silence free media. Last Friday, the “Lex-TVN” Act saying that only media owned by a majority within the European Union may legally broadcast, was passed by the Polish parliament.
It is aimed only at TVN, owned partly by U.S.-based Discovery, which has exposed numerous wrongdoings by the present government. Unless the president vetoes it, Poles will soon no longer watch independent TV and be limited to the socalled “public” TV which spews out ruling party propaganda and orchestrates hate campaigns against the opposition. The Polish president has a history of signing practically everything that the ruling party passes.
The Law and Justice party ruling Poland since 2015 is intent on perpetuating its power. At the time of the refugee crisis, it managed to effectively frighten a part of the population with propaganda about refugees spreading diseases and fundamentalist terror. This mechanism has been tried out successfully in Germany against the Jews in the 1930s. Since assuming power, the party has dismantled most democratic institutions. Currently, storm clouds are gathering over the biggest free daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, whose editor-in-chief Adam Michnik, an icon of antiCommunist opposition and many years’ prisoner in People’s Poland is currently the target of a hate campaign.
Since the ruling party assumed power in Poland, the country has been going through an endless sequence of crises. It is at odds with most western European countries, the European Union and the U.S. It recently hosted a cordial meeting of extreme right leaders, viewed by some as neo-fascists, like Marine Le Pin from France, all enjoying best relations with Russia’s president Putin.
This government knows that the best time for forcing antidemocratic laws through without adequate discussion, is just before Christmas when the population is preoccupied with holiday arrangements. This included overtaking the Constitutional Tribunal, and making a revolution within the judiciary system, appointing judges subordinated to the minister of justice who is also prosecutor-general. Their job is to discipline judges whose verdicts do not please the government, by firing or demoting to lower positions. But wrongdoings by ruling party officials, exposed by free media, are either ignored or downplayed. Before last Christmas, the law forbidding abortion even if the fetus is deformed and doomed to die was enacted, to ensure support from fundamentalist church groups.
People likely to support the present government in case it loses majority are usually not prosecuted, even for horrific acts or words. Recently, a neofascist and his followers staged an anti-Jewish meeting in the city of Kalisz, calling death threats to Jews. They were finally arrested but days later released
on token bail. Probably their case will take years to process, if at all.
The state of emergency imposed on the eastern borderlands, designed to prevent public opinion from seeing treatment of refugees by Polish border guards has been replaced by a new law, allowing journalists but only under the watchful eye of government officials, like in North Korea.
Free media is the last bastion of freedom in Poland. The TVN station will no longer expose what the government hides from public knowledge. Poles, struggling with soaring inflation and mishandled pandemic, deprived of means available to citizens of democratic countries, may be unable to effect any change. Poland may become an authoritarian state. I appeal to everyone in Canada to voice support for democracy in the country of my birth.