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Prime-minister Donald Tusk’s first month in office was quite an eventful one, as the political war in Poland went into overdrive. Politicians of the former ruling PiS party occupied public television buildings in an attempt to block a change in the management of the public media, which was heavily politicized during their tenure in power. A former PiS minister and his deputy were arrested inside the presidential palace, where they were taking shelter following a jail sentence. Conservative president and former PiS member Andrzej Duda spoke to the nation twice about the country’s internal situation and security, and the prosecutor's office receives a notification about a suspicion of committing a crime by... the Prosecutor General.
Time alone will tell weather this political warfare is a last stand of a populist-conservative breed epitomized by PiS’ Jarosław Kaczyński, or the new norm of Polish politics.
A police raid inside the presidential palace
Over the past two weeks, I started writing this piece anew every day. Because each day turned the events of the previous day upside down. And if it was hard to keep up for someone who follows Polish politics on a regular basis, how to explain all this to outsiders? Perhaps we should find consolation in the fact that difficult and complicated times bring unusually abundant harvests in the form of memes and jokes - incomprehensible events require simple justifications and relieve the tension with laughter.
One of my favorite satirical cartoons from recent days shows a scientist with shaggy hair in a style of Albert Einstein expounding his bold theory: "A politician in prison does not automatically become a political prisoner. Just as an electrician's chair is not automatically an electric chair”. Yet right-wing politicians, led by President Andrzej Duda, claim that two of their colleagues from the Law and Justice (PiS) party – both sentenced to jail in a court of law – are political prisoners, innocent victims of the new government's retaliation. The prisoners are Mariusz Kamiński, former head of the Ministry of Interior and Administration from 2019 to 2023, and his deputy Maciej Wąsik. The two men also coordinated the secret services, and they had worked together, almost two decades ago, at the helm of Poland’s Anticorruption Bureau. It was in that latter capacity that, according to the court, they had abused their power. In 2007, they issued a decision without legal basis to forge documents as part of a special operation. They incited corruption (tested the honesty of politicians from other parties) and exceeded their powers. Both were convicted in 2015, but then President Duda pardoned them. The problem is that he was in a hurry and granted the pardon before all the legal ways of attacking the three-year prison sentence were exhausted. This formal error led to a retrial, which ended in December 2023.
This time, the politicians were sentenced to two years in prison. Their parliamentary mandates were terminated, but the men announced that they would take their seats in Parliament in January, to which the court reacted by ordering the police to take them to prison by force.
On January 9, they were still at large. On that day, employees of the Chancellery of the President sent a car to Warsaw’s Praga district. The driver did not know who he was going to pick up. His passenger turned out to be Mariusz Kamiński. Wąsik came to the Presidential Palace by himself. On the same day, both convicted politicians posed for a photo with the president and his two new advisers. In the afternoon, they went out to the courtyard and made a short statement that they remained MPs, and then they went back inside. As described by the newspaper "Gazeta Wyborcza", the employees of the president's office were surprised by this. They assumed that after the conference, the convicted politicians would leave the premises of the presidential palace and go outside, where the police were waiting for them, and perhaps they would be arrested there.
It happened differently. The administration was ordered to prepare rooms for guests in the presidential apartment on the third floor. At the same time, their suitcases with their private belongings were delivered to the palace. Kamiński and Wąsik also received the phone number of the kitchen staff so that they could order food and drinks themselves. Information spread among officials stated that politicians would live there at least until Thursday the 11th of January and would only leave for the demonstration announced by PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński, called the "march of free people”.
However, when Andrzej Duda left the Presidential Palace (he had a planned meeting with the leader of the Belarusian opposition, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya), two deputy commanders of the State Protection Service – Colonels Krzysztof Król and Bartłomiej Hebda – and 14 policemen arrived at the Palace. The head of the Chancellery of the President, Grażynie Ignaczak-Bandych, reportedly called Hebda a "Judas", and Wąsik allegedly said: "I won't forgive you." Both politicians were led away in handcuffs.
Kamiński and Wąsik were sent to two different prisons, and they both began hunger strikes. President Duda believes that they are innocent and that his act of clemency from 2015 is legally valid, so he transferred the responsibility for releasing them from prison to Prosecutor General Adam Bodnar. It may not be a particularly sophisticated chess game, but every day brings new facts. One can suspect that this is exactly what Jarosław Kaczyński's camp wants – to confuse, delay decisions, create further formal problems, involve Tusk's government in quarrels, engage in artificially prepared disputes just to make the functioning of the new government more difficult.
If President Andrzej Duda pardons PiS politicians for the second time, they will be released, but they will not regain their parliamentary seats, and this will be an image defeat for the opposition. Duda and Kaczyński do not want this, so the game continues.
Kaczyński seems to believe that if he loses control of the public media, PiS may collapse
On January 16, as the Polish Parliament was debating a budget-related bill, another former PiS Minister of Internal Affairs, Mariusz Błaszczak took to the podium and protested – quite loudly – what he called the "unlawful detention of Mariusz Kamiński and Maciej Wąsik" and the attack on the free public media. PiS MPs started applauding and chanting: "free the MPs". They also sang the national anthem, which prevented further proceedings of the Parliament. All these happened as the wives of the two arrested politicians, who were present in the plenary room, were watching.
Battles between the opposition and the new ruling bloc are taking place in many fields. The first ones began in the corridors of the headquarters of Telewizja Polska TVP, the public broadcaster, completely dominated in recent years by Jarosław Kaczyński's people, who transformed public radio and television into a propaganda mouthpiece for the PiS government. It was clear that Donald Tusk, after taking over as head of government, would want to bring about changes in the management board of TVP and Polskie Radio (PR) as quickly as possible. These changes took place in late December, when the Minister of Culture, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, removed the CEOs of TVP and PR from their positions, and appointed new supervisory boards, which elected new management boards. Such competences lie with the National Media Council, dominated by PiS nominees. Sienkiewicz bypassed the council, citing commercial company law.
Later – when President Andrzej Duda vetoed the budget-related act with money for public media – the minister issued a resolution to liquidate all state-owned media companies, and appointed a liquidator who now manages the companies. Therefore, it was never about the actual liquidation of the public media, but about ending the dispute about who governs TVP, Polish Radio and the Polish Press Agency (PAP), and on what basis. The pretext for putting the companies into liquidation was the veto of President Andrzej Duda, who questioned the financing of the media from public funds; that was a complete reversal of the support Duda had shown during the PiS government, when TVP and PR received funding of nearly EUR 700 million per year.
Minister Sienkiewicz's decisions were denounced by PiS, while the National Media Council appointed Michał Adamczyk as the new head of Telewizja Polska. The latter was a news presenter on TVP 1, and one of the most important faces of the PiS government's propaganda. It was revealed that only in 2023, when Adamczyk had to disappear from the screen due to an "image crisis" (he was accused of physical violence against a woman with whom he had an affair), he earned almost PLN 1.5 million (EUR 350,000). As it turned out, the public broadcaster generously rewarded not only Adamczyk, but also, among others, advisors to the president of TVP, who are often also PiS politicians. The million-zloty income of journalists and people managing public media has caused public outrage. Nonetheless, PiS politicians and people like Michał Adamczyk claim they are victims of a political witch hunt, and they protested by occupying the TVP building in central Warsaw.
Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal (TK) ruled, on January the 19th, that a provision of the Broadcasting Act that the Commercial Companies Code may be applied to Telewizja Polska and Polskie Radio is unconstitutional. Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz said that the ruling has no legal significance and should be ignored. The Tribunal had been accused of being politicized, and its impartiality has been questioned in Brussels, as it is headed by Jarosław Kaczyński's friend Julia Przyłębska.
This game will certainly be long and fierce, because PiS was convinced that it had done everything to block the possibility of making changes in the TVP and PR it controlled. It is not difficult to guess why Kaczyński is so keen to maintain his control over the public media. Without this, PiS propaganda becomes much less visible, which may lead to a drop in the polls which in turn may cause an exodus to other parties and ultimately internal rifts ahead of local elections on April 7.
Scandals are likely to continue as long as Kaczyński leads the PiS. Would Andrzej Duda challenge the veteran conservative leader?
The fuel that the new government gave PiS in the form of an unceremonious takeover of public media, as well as a „news series” starring Kamiński and Wąsik, may quickly run out. And it is clear that Jarosław Kaczyński has no idea how to react to social changes and give new life to the right wing after their loss of power. But the reality is that only the president can challenge the leadership of the nearly 75-year-old man. Andrzej Duda doesn't have to organize a coup, which he's probably not fit for anyway; all he needs to do is gather around himself a group of people who are frustrated and don't share Kaczyński's decisions. This shouldn’t be that hard, considering that he's the only politician associated with PiS who has real power today. It seems that Duda knows that this is the best moment to take power in the PiS camp, but will he really be able to?
Duda is liked by the PiS youth and is seen, within the party, as man of dialogue. After the autocratic Kaczyński, who behaves now-adays like the captain of a ship sailing aground, Duda would be a breath of freedom in the PiS environment. That could translate in a new, more creative approach to politics by the party, away from its current obsession with fighting Donald Tusk.
For now, PiS is still ruled by Kaczyński, who seems unable to come with a new strategy. This means that, at least for now, Poles should witness more scandals in the like of those seen during Tusk’s government first month in office.
