Opposition candidate may “fulfil Jewish demands” if he wins presidency, warns Polish state TV

The main evening news broadcast on state television, which is used by the government to broadcast its message and attack opponents, has again sought to suggest that the opposition presidential candidate will support Jewish demands for Holocaust restitution from Poland.

“Will Trzaskowski fulfil Jewish demands?” read the headline of a news report, referring to Rafał Trzaskowski, the centrist candidate standing against incumbent conservative Andrzej Duda in this Sunday’s presidential election run-off.

“Trzaskowski has avoided answering on the subject of war reparations that some Jewish organisations demand,” said the presenter, Michał Adamczyk, introducing the story. “It is evidently an uncomfortable question for the candidate.”

By contrast, “President Andrzej Duda says clearly [that] Poles were victims of the Second World War and will not pay for German or Soviet crimes”, continued Adamczyk.

As evidence of Trzaskowski’s alleged sympathies to Jewish claims, TVP showed how this week the candidate had refused to directly answer a question on the topic. In the clip, Trzaskowski said that “the issue is serious [but] too complex to discuss in this way during the campaign”.

The news report, however, cut out the section of Trzaskowski’s answer in which he said that he “would not sign a law” paying war reparations to Jews. However, he noted that there was no such proposal on the agenda and accused TVP of deliberately stoking the issue.

TVP also played a clip of Trzaskowski saying, in 2014 when he served as a deputy foreign minister in the former government, that the issue of restitution “should be discussed with Jewish organisations”.

The report contrasted this to a clip of Duda rejecting the idea that Jewish organisations should benefit from heirless property restitution in Poland.

It also went on to suggest that Trzaskowski was – like Donald Tusk, the prime minister he served under – sympathetic towards the Germans and that he would not seek war reparations for Poland from Germany, as the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party says it wishes to do.

The news segment finished with the reporter saying: “On 12 July, Poles choose what kind of policy the president of Poland will pursue: pro-Polish or pro-Germany.”

Most of the remainder of Thursday evening’s news broadcast was also devoted to positive coverage of Duda’s campaign or criticism of Trzaskowski, who was referred to as the “candidate of the elites” in another headline.

At the end of the programme, TVP conducted a ten-minute interview with Duda, allowing him to present his main campaign messages. This included a question about property restitution, to which he said that he opposed any measures that “treated one ethnic group as privileged”.

TVP, which is publicly owned and funded, has a statutory obligation to be impartial, balanced and independent (though under previous governments it has also come under some political influence). Earlier this year, Duda approved an additional 2 billion zloty of funding for the channel.

Throughout the subsequent election campaign, TVP has used its news programming to support the re-election of Duda and to criticise Trzaskowski.

This has included repeated news reports portraying Trzaskowski as working on behalf of a “powerful foreign lobby” linked to George Soros and the Bilderberg group, which TVP claims was responsible for bringing Muslim immigrants to Europe and seeking to introduce “LGBT ideology”

The channel has also suggested that Trzaskowski wants to allow Jews to “rob” Poland of “200 billion zloty” in restitution claims. Last month, Trzaskowski sued the station over its “false” reporting.

Observers from the OSCE, in their report on the first round of the election, which took place on 28 June, said that the campaign had been “characterised by intolerant rhetoric and a public broadcaster that failed in its duty to offer balanced and impartial coverage”.

“Some of [TVP’s] reporting was charged with xenophobic and antisemitic undertones,” noted the OSCE. Reporters Without Borders has called TVP a “government propaganda mouthpiece”.

Last month, in response to TVP’s reports associating Trzaskowski with Soros and with Jewish groups wanting to “rob” Poland, the American Jewish Committee (ACJ) filed a complaint with Poland’s Media Ethics Council (REM), an independent body established by the Association of Polish Journalists.

The council found that TVP’s broadcasts had “incited antisemitism and hatred against minorities” and “violated the principles of the Media Ethics Charter”.

Main image credit: Wiadomości TVP

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.