WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland’s ruling right-wing party lost its parliamentary majority Wednesday after a small coalition partner announced that it was leaving the government amid a rift over legislation it views as an attack on media freedom.
The media bill, which is scheduled for an afternoon vote, would prevent non-European owners from having controlling stakes in Polish media companies. It is viewed as a crucial test for the survival of independent media in the former communist nation, coming six years into the rule of a populist government that has chipped away at media and judicial independence.
After a deputy prime minister who is the head of the Agreement party expressed his opposition to the bill and other government plans Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki fired him from government on Tuesday. Agreement party leader Jaroslaw Gowin had said he viewed the legislation as an attack on media diversity.
Gowin’s party said Wednesday that it was formally leaving the governing coalition, meaning that the ruling Law and Justice party has lost the support of Agreement’s 13 votes in parliament — and the slim majority it held in the 460-seat Sejm, the lower house of parliament. Agreement was viewed as the most moderate partner in the conservative three-party coalition that has governed Poland since 2015.
A vote was expected nonetheless on the media amendment at the center of the dispute, with Law and Justice expecting to pick up the needed votes from opposition lawmakers, including some from far-right nationalist groups.
The European Union has accused the Law and Justice-led Polish government of defying the EU’s democratic values. But the 27- member bloc has had few tools for altering either Warsaw’s course, or that of authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, under whom media diversity has been sharply curtailed.
The bill is widely viewed as a effort to silence an independent, U.S.-owned television broadcaster that is critical of the government. If it passes, it would require American company Discovery Inc. to sell its controlling stake in TVN, a network with many channels that operates Poland’s all-news station TVN24 and has a flagship evening news program watched daily by millions.
Critics say they fear the bill, if passed, would mark a huge step away from democracy, and the ideals fought for by Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in the 1980s.
“A vote for taking over TVN will be a vote for an anti-Western dictatorship with impunity for thieves,” Radek Sikorski, a former Polish foreign minister, said. “We all know it, and so do the PiS (Law and Justice) lawmakers. I did not think they were capable of such a betrayal of the ideals of Solidarity.”
Protests against the media amendment were held in dozens of cities and towns in Poland on Tuesday. Speakers voiced their fear that eliminating TVN as an an independent voice would bring back a level of censorship that many Poles still remember from communism.
“I am afraid that there will be censorship, that it will be followed by the lack of democracy, simply a totalitarian state,” protester Lucyna Kiderska said in Warsaw. “Slowly, slowly we will come back to the past.”
___
Rafal Niedzielski contributed to this report.
