Roman Giertych, an MP from Donald Tusk’s ruling Civic Coalition (KO) and an attorney for the Tusk family has said Catholic radio station Radio Maryja should have its licence revoked for allegedly violating the Concordat between Poland and the Vatican.
The Concordat is an agreement that sets out the rights of the Church in Poland and regulates such issues as the teaching of Catholic catechism in schools, State funding for the Catholic Church and church property rights.
Giertych alleged that the foundation was furnished with public funds during the lifetime of the previous Law and Justice party (PiS) government to the tune of close to €100m and that its partisan political stance was a violation of the Concordat.
In a series of posts on platform X, Giertych argued that the Polish State cannot ignore the Catholic Church’s alleged involvement in PiS election campaigns and called for decisive action to ensure the Concordat is respected by all parties.
He said that removing Radio Maryja‘s licence should be a priority following a presidential election due in Poland next May and that any religious institution receiving such a licence should have to guarantee adherence to the Concordat.
Radio Maryja, founded by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, has been in existence for over 30 years and has been a Conservative Catholic voice critical of Liberal governments and supportive of the former ruling PiS.
Fr Rydzyk’s Lux Veritatis foundation, which he co-founded in 1996, is the owner of Radio Maryja, the television channel TV Trwam and the daily newspaper Nasz Dziennik.
Claims regarding the alleged maltreatment of a detained priest in Poland have prompted outrage in the country. https://t.co/1IvEKmAeHE
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) July 3, 2024
The Tusk government has been criticised for its takeover of public media following its election win in December last year. The administration argued it was doing it because such media had become merely a mouthpiece for PiS.
Following that, independent media watchdog Demagog and the country’s National Broadcasting Council (NBC) have produced an analysis allegedly showing that public media was now heavily biased in favour of the Tusk government.
Any revoking of a broadcasting licence for a media outlet independent of the State would be an unprecedented step and would only be possible should the ruling majority seize control of the NBC, the body responsible for issuing broadcast licences.
To do that, both the lower and upper chambers of parliament, as well as the country’s president, would have to agree to do so.
Last year’s NBC annual report was rejected by parliament but approved by President Andrzej Duda, a PiS ally.
Still, the ruling coalition is reportedly hopeful it can win the next presidential election and then the way will be clear to remove the current NBC membership and replace it with one sympathetic to the Tusk government.
When in opposition, Tusk’s party had made a point of criticising the Catholic Church for allegedly becoming too close to PiS. One of Tusk’s front-line MPs, Sławomir Nitras, had said in advance of the 2023 election that Catholics should have their “privileges stripped from them.”
Since coming to office, the new government has promised to look at ways of cutting state funding for the Catholic Church and in July made the high-profile arrest of Father Michal Olszewski, whom it alleged was involved in extorting public money from the Justice Fund.
He has been held in pre-trial detention ever since, and has claimed that in the early days of his detention, he had been denied food and water and kept awake during the night, which some PiS politicians have condemned as being tantamount to torture.
Giertych has led the charge in publicising the alleged abuses of the Justice Fund and indicting PiS politicians, claiming it had been used as a mechanism for funding PiS politicians’ election campaigns.
Giertych has also publicly called for the PiS to be outlawed on the grounds that the party had allegedly violated the constitution and was therefore a threat to democracy.
Until 2009, the MP was the leader of a right-wing Catholic nationalist party called the League of Polish Families (LPR), which in 2006 formed a coalition government with the PiS and the radical agrarian group Samoobrona.
That coalition government, in which Giertych served as Deputy PM and education minister, collapsed in 2007 after an anti-corruption sting against the Samoobrona leader Andrzej Lepper. Both the agrarians and the LPR failed to make it into parliament in the subsequent election later that year.
Giertych became a sworn enemy of PiS and its leader Jarosław Kaczyński and spent the next 15 years developing his career as an attorney who often appeared in headline-grabbing political cases.
He returned to frontline politics in 2023 when Tusk decided to place him on the KO’s parliamentary slate. Giertych was elected but fell out of party favour when, in June, he refused to vote with it and the Left to decriminalise abortions.
Tusk suspended him from the front bench for what the PM regarded as an act of rebellion.
