A week into office, Poland’s new government headed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrestled the public media out of the control of the previous administration on December 20 in a move that appeared as effective as it was legally controversial.

Tusk’s Minister of Culture Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz dismissed the supervisory boards and management teams of public broadcasters TVP and Polish Radio, as well as the state-run news agency PAP, citing his powers as a representative of the state’s treasury, which controls 100% stakes in each of the media.

Sienkiewicz said he acted in line with a resolution passed by the Polish parliament on December 19 that called for the reinstation of “citizens’ access to reliable information, the functioning of public media, as well as ensuring [their] independence, objectivity, and pluralism”. 

In the hours since the minister’s decision, chaos engulfed TVP, Poland’s biggest broadcaster that was instrumental in driving home PiS’ victory in the 2019 election after the now-former ruling party took it over in 2015, transforming it into a relentless propaganda machine.

TVP’s new channel, TVP Info, stopped broadcasting altogether while the main channel TVP 1 aired a brief note on changes coming to its flagship news programme Wiadomosci. The note was delivered by a news anchor who left the broadcaster shortly after PiS took it over. 

PiS leaders rallied at TVP headquarters in angry response, claiming the takeover by the Tusk government was illegal and an attack on freedom of the media.

The coalition called the rallying hypocritical, given that PiS put public media under tight political control during its eight years in power, causing Poland to slip down media freedom rankings heavily.

Under PiS in the last two years, TVP especially targeted Tusk, whom the broadcaster’s journalists painted a German puppet and — not entirely without grounds — the man responsible for the disenfranchisement of millions of Poles during his time in power between 2007 and 2014.

There are doubts as to the legality of the takeover, Ben Stanley, a sociologist and political commentator, noted on X (formerly Twitter).

“What has happened is coherent with the letter of the law, but not with the spirit of the law. The latter would have been fulfilled by restoring to KRRiT [Poland’s media oversight body] the powers that were illegitimately removed from it by PiS,” Stanley said.

To do that, Stanley added, the Tusk government would have to pass relevant legislation, which, however, would run the risk of being vetoed by President Andrzej Duda, a steadfast ally of PiS.

Duda reminded Tusk in November that he would not hesitate to veto legislation he did not like.

And even if the new government did restore the powers of KRRiT, it would be an own goal, as the body remains stacked with PiS loyalists, even if PiS themselves limited KRRiT’s prerogatives.

“This has been the problem facing the new government from the outset: how to act quickly, definitively, and in accordance with the rule of law,” Stanley also said, adding that the government may only be able to be fast and decisive — but not in line with the law.

It remained unclear on December 20 who the new government appointed, or would appoint, to the new supervisory boards of the public media as well as to their management.

In a separate but politically related development on the same day, a Warsaw court sentenced two PiS MPs, the former home affairs and administration minister Mariusz Kaminski and his deputy Marcin Wasik, to two years in prison for abusing their power as heads of Poland’s anti-corruption force CBA in 2007.

The court’s sentence was immediately valid and the two MPs appear to face being stripped of their MP mandates and immunity in the coming days before heading to jail.

Kaminski and Wasik were pardoned by President Duda in 2015 for their involvement in the 2007 scandal, with some legal experts disputing the pardon because Duda granted it before an earlier court sentence against the two MPs became legally binding.

“The pardon from 2015 was executed by the law, as confirmed by the Constitutional Tribunal, and remains legally valid,” Duda’s office said in a post on X.

The convicted MPs told Polish media they were not going to jail and that the court’s sentence was “contemptible”, possibly setting a new controversy involving the Tusk government, Duda and PiS if the government decided to press on to put the MPs behind bars.