Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, has a very special place in his heart for Gazeta Wyborcza, the leading Polish daily newspaper. He hates it.

The most powerful politician in the country gave a hour-long lecture in January at a seminar organised by an ultra-conservative Catholic journalism school in Toruń, northern Poland. The seminar was titled The Faces of Manipulation, and a substantial part of Kaczyński’s speech was devoted to Gazeta.

After the fall of communism in 1989, Kaczyński said, the newspaper disseminated “liberalism, anti-traditionalism, anti-Catholicism” and was “against the very notion of the nation”.

He accused Gazeta of using the “pedagogics of shame”, by which he meant the destruction of Polish national pride, by reminding Poles about the less illustrious moments of our history such as the role of Polish collaborators in the Holocaust.

No wonder that for many of Law and Justice supporters, whose party came into government 100 days ago this week, Gazeta Wyborcza is the nexus of all evil: it spreads western, liberal values and vigorously defends institutions created by 25 years of democracy, which Kaczyński considers to be a shameful period of Poland’s history.

Kaczyński’s ministers have explicitly forbidden government institutions to advertise in the paper and cancelled subscriptions for government offices and courts. It seems vindictive and petty, but for Law and Justice it was a symbolic act of long-delayed justice: the hated newspaper is not going to get a penny from government coffers.

In my 22 years of work for Gazeta I have never felt such pressure – and I never got so much hate mail, a lot of it full of antisemitic vitriol.

There is constant gossip in the media about state-controlled companies buying shares of Agora, Gazeta’s parent company (the ownership structure is complicated and a hostile takeover is difficult, but imaginable).



The newspaper is sharply critical of the new government. Its journalists participated in the marches organised by the Committee for Defence of Democracy – a grassroots social movement, which in December led tens of thousands Poles on to the streets after the new government tried to paralyse the country’s constitutional court.

Jarosław Kurski, the vice-editor-in-chief of Gazeta, was – among other liberal journalists – a prominent speaker during the demonstrations.



While the conservative politicians and their supporters claim that they do not care what Europe thinks, they react with pain and anger to criticism in the western media – even more so when the stories are written by Polish journalists.

My colleagues from Gazeta who have written for the German press were labelled “traitors” by rightwing media and their fans on the internet. These tough defenders of national pride and tradition have surprisingly sensitive feelings.

So far they can only talk: our readership has gone up since the elections and morale in the newsroom is high. If Gazeta disappeared somehow from the Polish media landscape, the government would probably announce this date as a holiday.