In Poland, the parliamentary majority of Prime Minister Donald Tusk is preparing to adopt a state budget that would fund Polish Radio and Polish Television (TVP) at only 0.06% of GDP. This level is lower than the 0.09% proposed by the Ministry of Culture last year, the 0.10% of GDP allocated in 2023, and the European average, which the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) estimates at 0.12%. The EBU, along with the Polish Society of Journalists, is calling on the majority to abandon these budget cuts, which are deemed incompatible with the implementation of the EMFA – a law the government has nevertheless pledged to uphold.
This European legislation is also being defied by neighbouring Lithuania. On 27 November, the ruling coalition voted to freeze the budget of the public broadcaster LRT for the next three years, maintaining it at 79.6 million euros. In addition, parliament has approved a reduction starting in 2029: the share of funding from income tax will fall from 1% to 0.75%, and the share taken from indirect taxes will diminish from 1.3% to 0.8%. The Nemunas Ausra party, the junior coalition partner and Trump ally that initiated these cuts – which are disproportionate compared with other areas of the state budget – justifies them by claiming LRT’s services are of insufficient quality. This argument contradicts a state audit of LRT, which, on the contrary, considered that an increase in its budget was fully justified.
Hostile to journalists who exposed its leaders’ links with Russia and Belarus, Nemunas Ausra has gone even further in seeking to destabilise LRT, which holds the certificate of the Journalism Trust Initiative, an international professional standard developed by RSF to denote media outlets that uphold high ethical standards. The Lithuanian parliament is currently examining a proposal that would weaken the safeguards protecting LRT’s independence. The amendment would allow the supervisory body of the public broadcaster, the LRT Council, to dismiss the director-general with 6 votes out of 12 instead of the 8 currently required, and without any obligation to demonstrate that the director-general had acted against the public interest.