When Telewizja Republika starts to conduct foreign policy for us

Contrary to the hopes of some half of politically active Poles, Zbigniew Ziobro from Budapest did not end up in a Polish prison, but in the United States. It is not very clear how he actually got there – as „Gazeta Wyborcza” established, the IT systems did not register that he left the Schengen area. There are therefore speculations that he could have been illegally taken to Serbia – perhaps with the help of Hungarian services, before the new government took control of them – and from there flown across the ocean.

The former Minister of Justice, escaping from the European Union like a hero of a second-rate spy film, elevates Polish politics to new levels of grotesqueness. Ziobro’s escape mocks both the former leader of Sovereign Poland and the government side, which for nearly three years has been unable to hold him accountable. At the same time, the whole case has not only a comic dimension. Ziobro in the States could become a problem in our relations with the Trump administration, transferring internal political disputes to the transatlantic level.

Diplomacy of Sakiewicz

That is why PiS politicians who helped Ziobro to leave for the United States and lobbied on his behalf in the White House – media mention, among others, Adam Bielan – deserve the highest condemnation. Such behavior is contrary to Polish national interest. What is most interesting about the whole matter, among the players expected to play a significant role in effectively evacuating Ziobro across the ocean, are not only politicians but also Tomasz Sakiewicz and his television Republika.

Ziobro just gave his first interview to the American “exile” station. As can be understood, he is to serve as a correspondent and informal commentator for Republika in the United States. According to Business Insider, Ziobro may not only record reports from New York or Washington but also assist in developing Sakiewicz’s American projects. Behind the ocean, there is the TV Republika Foundation, collecting donations from US residents for “independent media” in Poland. In December last year, the “Financial Times” reported that Republika plans to open an English-language news channel with the support of “investors close to the MAGA movement”.

Taking up work as a Republika correspondent, as determined by Onet’s findings, could have enabled Ziobro to obtain a journalistic visa, thanks to which he entered the country. Consequently, the prosecutor’s office is to interrogate Sakiewicz as a witness – to establish whether he helped Ziobro avoid criminal responsibility – and Republika has already called a demonstration in defense of its boss. Dominika Wielowieyska writes in “Gazeta Wyborcza” that Republika “arranged”, using its contacts within the MAGA movement, a visa for Ziobro in the Trump administration.

If indeed Republika was one of the forces that “lobbied” for Ziobro’s entry into the US, then only with a slight journalistic exaggeration could one say that although the constitution states that the state is represented externally by the president, and foreign policy is conducted by the government, in practice it is also co-shaped today by Sakiewicz’s television – at least when it comes to relations with Trump’s Washington.

Bridge to MAGA

The Ziobro case is, after all, no exception here. Republika has long been systematically building contacts within the MAGA environment. And when Trump returned to the White House, these contacts gained the highest political significance, allowing Sakiewicz’s environment to play at the highest state level.

At the very beginning of Trump’s second term, in February 2025, Andrzej Duda traveled to meet the American president during the CPAC conference, then held in Oxon Hill, Maryland.

The meeting is hard to consider a success: Trump was late, the conversation was brief, and from the entire ocean trip, only images of the Polish president nervously waiting for the delayed American leader in some anonymous hotel space emerged.

Duda’s waiting was broadcast live by Republika – thus putting the president in a PR bind. Moreover, as Onet reported, for Duda’s visit to the US at that time and in that format, the Rachoni brothers were pressuring: Michał, the program director of Republika, and Nikodem, then employed as deputy to the presidential minister for international affairs. There were even voices in PiS that Duda was reduced to the role of a “puppet” of the Republika environment.

It was Republika that organized – together with the PiS-controlled Podkarpackie Voivodeship local government – the CPAC conference in Jasionka near Rzeszów, where MAGA representatives appointed Karol Nawrocki as a local representative of the movement. The sponsor of the event was Zondacrypto, which today is a source of significant image problems for the president’s environment and the PiS camp.

Zondacrypto also sponsored the “Transatlantic Summit” held during Nawrocki’s first visit to the US, in September last year. Sakiewicz’s TV not only extensively covered the president’s visit abroad but, as Agata Szczęśniak noted in her analysis of the station’s coverage, even presented the visit’s arrangements – e.g., Trump’s declaration that American soldiers would remain in Poland – as a success of “civil diplomacy” practiced by the station, which aims to maintain good relations between Poland and Trump’s White House, contrary to Tusk’s government policy. Because, as PiS and media within its orbit tirelessly repeat, “at the behest of Germany, they want to sow discord between Poland and America.”

In summary, it is clear that Sakiewicz’s environment has done a great job of building a bridge connecting the MAGA movement with the Polish right, and now tries to use these contacts to build its own, independent political position on the Polish right. And since the president of Poland is Nawrocki, and the US is under Trump, this political game of Republika sometimes produces effects reaching the level of inter-state relations and key interests of our country. Because even if one halves or even fifths the narrative of Republika’s environment about its American contacts, it cannot be denied that they are capable of generating real effects.

Problem for both sides

Sakiewicz’s ambitions and his environment are a problem for both sides of the Polish political duopoly. For the government, the problem is not only the confusion that Ziobro’s potential influence on relations with the Americans could introduce but also the negative message that Republika’s environment leaks about him to US partners.

When PiS was in power, it reacted paranoically to every critical article about its policies published by a Polish author in foreign press; party politicians and its media shouted about “spying on Poland” and “lying elites” acting against their own state. It seems that PiS’s backers might do the same – only through internal MAGA channels rather than openly appealing to the American public, although this could change if an English-language Republika channel actually emerges.

Sakiewicz’s ambitions are also a problem for PiS and Jarosław Kaczyński. Relations between Nowogrodzka and Sakiewicz have long been tense. The party complains that fundraising for Republika draws right-wing voters’ money that should support PiS – leading to, among other things, a ridiculous on-air quarrel between MP Joanna Lichocka and Adrian Klarenbach – over promoting Confederation on the station’s programs or over giving too much attention to internal conflicts with PiS. Jarosław Kaczyński certainly has no desire for these issues to reach Sakiewicz’s international contacts and their influence on decision-makers in the White House.

The fact that Sakiewicz managed to grow so much – not only commercially but also politically – since PiS lost power is also a symptom of Kaczyński’s one-man rule crisis on the right. The head of Republika acts as if he is already playing a game for a new division on the right, for after Kaczyński. One might even wonder whether it would be better for him, business-wise and politically, if the right did not return to power in 2027, so that the subsequent years in opposition could produce a genuinely new arrangement on the other side. And although this was not necessarily his intention, the embarrassing evacuation of Ziobro across the ocean will certainly not make it easier for PiS to run a victorious campaign next year.  

The post When Telewizja Republika begins to conduct foreign policy for us first appeared on Krytyka Polityczna.