People scuffle with police as they try to block the road to the Polish Parliament in Warsaw.
Warsaw: Poland’s ruling Law & Justice party promised to rework plans for media coverage in parliament, taking a step back in the biggest political stand-off since it won 2015 elections.
After a meeting with media representatives early yesterday, Senate Speaker Stanislaw Karczewski said “the current regulations will continue, and we’ll talk about new guidelines from today,” effectively suspending plans to curb journalists’ access to parliament on January 1. The proposals, which weren’t consulted with leading broadcasters and newspapers, have led to tumultuous scenes inside and outside parliament since Friday.
“We should admit that we didn’t communicate changes to journalists and to society in a proper way,” Pawel Szefernaker, a deputy minister in Prime Minister Beata Szydlo’s Chancellery, said in Radio Zet yesterday. “The meeting yesterday and the next one planned for today shows we’re taking steps in this direction.”
Since winning power, Law & Justice has been accused by the European Commission of eroding the rule of law, raising concern that triggered Poland’s first ever credit downgrade by S&P Global Ratings. Lawmakers passed new curbs on public gatherings this week and planned to overhaul non-governmental organizations and limit reporting in parliament, fueling criticism that it’s backsliding on democratic standards 27 years after the collapse of communism.
For the first time since Law & Justice took power, police used force early yesterday to remove demonstrators blocking exit routes from parliament.
Hours earlier, opposition lawmakers delayed proceedings by refusing to yield the podium. Anti-government protests continued and more are planned.
President Andrzej Duda, a former member of the ruling party, urged both sides to help restore calm and started to meet with opposition officials on yesterday in a mediation effort. Rafal Trzaskowski, a lawmaker from the opposition Civic Platform party, said it’s not clear if Duda’s efforts are sincere as he has “never strayed from the Law & Justice line.”
Opposition lawmakers surrounded the podium on Friday, forcing lower house Speaker Marek Kuchcinski to abandon deliberations over 2017 budget. A few hours later, he reconvened the budget debate in an auxiliary chamber in parliament, where votes were counted by hand instead of the usual electronic system.
With hardly any opposition lawmakers taking part. He said the fiscal plan was passed with 234 votes for and 2 against, and that it will next go to the upper house. Three opposition parties condemned the vote as “illegal.”
