For ten days, the most important political question in Poland was: How will President Andrzej Duda react to the revision of the Broadcasting Act, which was whipped through parliament by the ruling party PiS on December 17th without prior notice?

Duda would have had until the new year to announce his decision, but he put an end to the escalating speculation in the otherwise quiet time between the years with a bang: He vetoed the law that the PiS said What is important is that she even accepted that Poland's relations with the United States are currently worse than they have been since the end of communism.

Reinhard Veser

Editor in politics.

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Duda has been elected President twice as a candidate for PiS.

He has signed almost all the laws that Poland's right-wing government has tried to bring the judiciary under its control over the past six years.

But what he did on Monday looks like a break with his political homeland - not only because of the veto itself, but also because of the explanations he provided.

There was great pressure on him from home and abroad not to simply sign the law.

Aggressive comments about TVN

Not only the Polish opposition, but also the EU and the United States see the law as an attack on the private television broadcaster TVN. This is the main competitor of the public television TVP, which has become a PiS propaganda organ, and reports critically on the government. The law known as "Lex TVN" was supposed to force the American group Discovery to sell its majority in the station within six months. So far it belongs to one hundred percent of a Dutch Discovery subsidiary, but according to the new rule, the share of capital from non-EU countries should have been only 49 percent.

In view of the disparaging to aggressive remarks about TVN, which are otherwise considered good form among PiS politicians, the fact that Duda described TVN as an "important and serious medium" right at the beginning of his statement made people sit up and take notice. This was followed by a series of verbal slaps for the ruling party. Duda emphasized that in view of the short transition period in the law, the question arises “whether the conditions are fair from a purely human point of view”. This is all the more true since the broadcaster's license has only just been extended.

That was in September after the supervisory authorities had postponed the decision for a year and a half to almost the last possible day - in the obvious hope that the PiS would have brought the "Lex TVN" through parliament by then.

Duda focused heavily on the guarantees of private property and entrepreneurial freedom in the Polish constitution, which he saw violated by the law.

"What should we do with other problems?"

In doing so, he struck a blow that was aimed at the Polish Constitutional Court, because if that had been the core of his concerns, it would have been obvious to submit the law to the court for review. Duda explained in detail why he did not want to choose this path: He could not be sure whether the Constitutional Court would take the Polish-American trade agreement from 1990 into account in its decision. But that is a particularly important point for him. He said twice that it was a matter of honor for Poland to abide by international treaties.

Duda stressed that international treaties would become part of the Polish legal system based on the provisions of the Constitution. His remarks had a double bottom on this subject. In the past two months, the Constitutional Court has questioned the validity of international agreements for Poland twice: in October it ruled that key parts of the EU treaty contradicted the Polish constitution, and in November it ruled that Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights - the guarantee of a fair trial - in this form only applies to a limited extent in Poland.

Another judgment on the European Convention on Human Rights is due in January.

Duda then became even more fundamental: only if Poland respected international treaties could it expect that others would also adhere to their obligations towards Poland.

And only in this case could Poland be regarded as a solid international partner - and he wanted Poland to be seen as such, both by the United States and within the EU.

He also took into account the votes of many simple Poles, said Duda, who were against the law.

People were worried that this law would drag the country into another expensive dispute.

“What should we do with other problems?” He replied the people's voice.

"We already have enough of it."