On his first day as the new head of TVP, the sprawling Polish public television broadcaster, Tomasz Sygut spent four hours locked in his office while a crowd outside banged on the door trying to gain access. Eventually, said Sygut, he had to call the police to help him escape.
The same day, two of the main TVP channels were abruptly taken off the air by the new managers, the feed replaced with holding music and the TVP logo. “The priority was to turn off the factory of hate,” Sygut said in an interview in his 10th-floor office atop TVP headquarters, with a panoramic view over Warsaw.
Appointed in December, soon after a new Polish government led by Donald Tusk took office, Sygut, 45, is at the centre of the first major battlefield in Tusk’s attempts to create a new and more tolerant Poland after eight years of rule by the rightwing, populist Law and Justice (PiS) party.
Under PiS, TVP’s main news station amplified goverment talking points and actively campaigned for the party ahead of October’s parliamentary election, portraying Tusk as a German agent bent on destroying Poland. The channel frequently targeted migrants, LGBTQ+ people and other minorities.
“The people who worked here over the last eight years, they weren’t journalists … it was a ministry of propaganda,” said Sygut. Since taking over, he has brought in over 200 new employees. Many of them, like Sygut himself, previously worked at TVP but left after PiS took over in 2015.
At a morning planning meeting for the main evening news show earlier this week, all 13 people sitting around the table were new hires since the takeover. “We have to re-establish credibility but it’s going to take time,” said Anna Łubian-Halicka, a reporter and presenter who returned to TVP in early March after several years at the private broadcaster Polsat.
Tusk’s government on Friday marks 100 days in office, a date by which Tusk had ambitiously promised to fulfil 100 key campaign promises (by one count, he has succeeded with only 17 of them). The new TVP will be responsible for monitoring and analysing Tusk’s attempts to remodel Poland, but the network itself is also a key part of the story.
Tusk’s coalition government finds itself in a strange position, with a huge mandate for change after record turnout in last October’s election but its hands tied legislatively. The PiS-allied president Andrzej Duda still wields veto power over any legislation, and during its years in office PiS packed ostensibly neutral bodies such as the media watchdog board with political appointees, making it hard to effect personnel changes.
“Long-term populism creates an ivy that creeps around institutions, it’s not easy to get rid of it and you have horrible legal dilemmas that are unprecedented,” said Jarosław Kuisz, a writer who recently published a book on Poland’s post-independence politics.
In the case of TVP, which Tusk had repeatedly promised on the campaign trail would be one of his first priorities for change, the action to take over the network was swift and used loopholes in the law that even Tusk supporters admitted were skirting the edges of legality.
As the new team took over the building, PiS supporters staged a “sit-in”, the president called the move “anarchy” and the police showed up. “It was an illegal takeover. If we had done that we would have had the European Commission calling for infringement procedures on a daily basis,” said the PiS MP Paweł Jabłoński.
Eventually, the demonstrators were turfed out and the new management got to work.
Tusk’s team say they had little choice. “It was a little bit brutal but it was necessary, because they trapped this legislation about public media in a way that they planned to keep control of it, and we couldn’t accept that,” said Tomasz Grodzki, a senator from Tusk’s party.
Initially, there was a hope that Duda, who will be 53 when he finishes his second term next year and might have one eye on a future international career, would prove amenable to working with the new government, but these hopes now appear to be unfounded.
The most dramatic clash between president and government came when the former interior minister Mariusz Kamiński and his ex-deputy, Maciej Wąsik, were imprisoned in February after being detained in the presidential palace over a 2015 conviction for abuse of power. Duda granted the pair a pardon.
In the latest standoff, Duda’s office this week suggested he would block the appointment of 50 new ambassadors, raising the prospect that the foreign ministry will need to keep paying the old ambassadors while appointing chargés d’affaires to take their places.
A presidential election is due next summer, and the governing coalition hopes that if it can win the presidency, too, there will be much more freedom to act. “If it’s impossible [to pass legislation], we’ll wait for a new president,” said Grodzki.
Until then, the man tasked with finding a way through the impasse is the justice minister, Adam Bodnar, a law professor and former human rights ombudsman.
“We’ll do everything that is possible with decrees, ordinances, limiting negative impact and changing the atmosphere … but maybe for legislative change we’ll have to wait a bit longer,” said Bodnar, speaking in his cavernous office, which features marble columns and pistachio walls. It was renovated under his predecessor, Zbigniew Ziobro, regarded as one of the key architects of the politicisation of the judiciary over the past years. In a symbolic change, Bodnar has replaced a wall-mounted Jesus on the cross, left by the previous inhabitant, with a poster extolling the Polish constitution.
So far, Bodnar has dismissed the national prosecutor removed several controversial judges who served as heads of regional courts and appointed a new head of the institution that trains young judges and prosecutors.
There was an open competition for this latter appointment, with 10 candidates and hearings that lasted for three days. It’s a sign, said Bodnar, of a new approach of transparency and openness, rather than the hasty politicised appointments of the PiS era.
The specifics of potential solutions to other problematic judicial areas quickly get into legal weeds that are hard for non-specialists to follow, but observers say that so far Bodnar has erred towards a more cautious approach, rather than following more radical voices who have called for more creative, dramatic solutions.
“The changes rely a lot on people who have specialist knowledge, they are slow and deliberative, and offer moderate solutions to big problems. It’s the opposite of populist lawmaking,” said legal expert Anna Wójcik.
The European Commission froze billions of euros of funds for Poland over rule of law concerns under PiS, but has already said it is encouraged by Bodnar’s plans for reform and will unfreeze up to €137bn.
One key area where millions of Poles are demanding change is on the country’s restrictive abortion laws, which were tightened further under PiS. Here, liberalisation faces strong opposition from Duda but also scepticism from more conservative elements of Tusk’s own coalition. The stalling of a parliamentary debate on abortion has led to frustration and protests.
While the draconian laws remain in force, Bodnar has promised to review cases where criminal proceedings relating to abortion have been brought and issue new guidelines to prosecutors. “It’s about sending a signal to women that we know about this restrictive law and we would like prosecutors not to interfere too much in women’s choices,” he said.
While a change in atmosphere, without the legislation to back it up, is clearly insufficient, many people say the importance of the new tone of public discourse is not to be underestimated. On TVP, which until December was one of the main platforms for PiS claims that so-called “LGBTQ+ ideology” was destroying Poland, this change of tone has been immediately obvious.
In February, the anchor Wojciech Szeląg invited two LGBTQ+ activists to the studio and apologised on behalf of the channel for the “shameful words” public media had directed at LGBTQ+ people. “LGBTQ+ people are not an ideology but people; specific names, faces, relatives and friends,” said Szeląg, before apologising.
“It would be nice to get an apology from the people who actually wronged you, but it still felt nice that people who have nothing to apologise for feel they can step forward and take responsibility for the institution,” said Maja Heban, one of the activists present in the studio.
She said that since the new government took office, activists and NGO representatives have been invited to ministries to discuss civil partnership policies. “It’s night and day, we went from being public enemies and people responsible for harming children, to people who are welcome in government buildings,” she said. She admitted though that there is a hope that the change does not remain symbolic, and actual legislation will follow.
For TVP, while the era of brash propaganda is over, scepticism remains over whether the channel can become a truly independent public broadcaster. Sygut insists there is no editorial pressure from politicians, but many in the newsroom remain wary, remembering that while PiS may have taken politicised public television to extremes, they did not invent the concept. “Our politicians are used to the thinking pattern that public television is something that politicians receive in the election as a prize,” said the presenter Łubian-Halicka.
Grzegorz Sajór, who started at TVP in 1990, just as Poland’s democratic era was getting under way, worked at the channel for 26 years before being pushed out in 2016. He has returned as head of editorial for TVP’s news programmes. He pointed out that when he started, the name of TVP’s main evening news programme was changed to Wiadomości, to mark a symbolic break with the communist past.
Wiadomości, more than any other programme, became linked to toxic PiS propaganda in recent years, and the name has been changed to simply “1930”, the time of its broadcast. “We have this same symbolic change again,” said Sajór.
The comparison of the post-PiS period with the transition out of communism is one that is heard frequently in today’s Poland. While it may be somewhat hyperbolic, it is also clear that what is taking place is more than a normal political transition from one government to another.
“Right now we need a social transformation, like the one we had after communism,” said Łubian-Halicka. Talking of the deep polarisation in society, she cited the example of her own 80-year-old father, who had been a fan of the previous TVP and is disdainful of the new news format featuring his daughter. “He is used to getting the party message from television; he doesn’t want news, he wants confirmation of what he thinks about the world,” she said.
Grodzki claimed that, in the same way that the communist period created a mindset that has been dubbed “homo sovieticus”, eight years of PiS had created a “homo PiSicus” in Poland.
“We have to eradicate this step by step, by a different narration in the public media. A generation will be needed to eradicate it for sure but we started our work on the very first day,” he said.
Additional reporting by Katarzyna Piasecka