“Here comes the Tusk we know. Police beat people, journalists are persecuted. You could be next,” says the narrator in a new campaign video released by Poland’s conservative Law and Justice party (PiS), highlighting what it describes as actions by Donald Tusk’s government targeting freedom of speech.
In recent days, a series of police interventions and unusual provocations have been directed at individuals associated with Telewizja Republika. The most widely discussed incident was Friday’s forceful police entry into the apartment of the station’s editor-in-chief, Tomasz Sakiewicz, during which his assistant was handcuffed.
The incident is being portrayed as the culmination of actions taken by the Donald Tusk-led government against Telewizja Republika and freedom of speech — actions critics claim were often unlawful or operated in a legal gray area.
The police operation triggered strong reactions, particularly from politicians affiliated with Law and Justice, who are demanding a full explanation of the case.
Today, Law and Justice published a video compilation presenting a series of incidents that took place during governments led by Civic Platform in Poland — beginning with the intervention by Poland’s Internal Security Agency at the newsroom of Wprost magazine in 2014, followed by what PiS describes as the unlawful takeover of public media in December 2023, the ransacking of cabinets at the headquarters of the National Council of the Judiciary, the suppression of farmers’ protests in March 2024, and finally Friday’s police entry into Tomasz Sakiewicz’s apartment.
“Here comes the Tusk we know. Police beat people, journalists are persecuted. You could be next,” the narrator says in the video.