Poland – In the run-up to Poland’s Oct. 15 elections, the Soros network made several moves in the Polish media and its NGOs invested significant sums of money in the campaign on social media.
On the media front, the Soros network’s latest acquisition in early October, through Soros’ Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) is a minority stake in Wirtualna Polska, the #1 news website in Poland. Wirtualna Polska, the owner of the wp.pl website, has 400 editorial staff and had 8.1 million unique visitors in September 2023, ahead of onet.pl, which was Poland’s #2 (7.7 unique visitors in September) and belongs to the Swiss-German Ringier Axel Springer media group.
This means that Poland’s two leading websites now belong to groups that openly support the liberal left and have a strong dislike for the outgoing Law and Justice parliamentary majority. The liberals and the left are now set on forming a governing coalition after the Oct. 15 elections.
MDIF’s chief investment officer, Joanna Różycka-Iwan, has now joined Wirtualna Polska’s board of directors.
In August, a Dutch company owned by MDIF and the Soros Economic Development Fund (SEDF), Pluralis B.V., took a majority stake in the owner of the prestigious Polish daily Rzeczpospolita, Gremi Media, and then resold part of its shares to a connected Hungarian left-wing media tycoon.
Pluralis B.V. acquired its first minority stake in Gremi Media in early 2022.
MDIF’s first entry in the Polish media market was in 2016, with the acquisition of shares in Agora, the owner of the Gazeta Wyborcza daily and the Tok FM radio station, which are two media outlets very supportive of the liberal left against Law and Justice. The Agora media group later bought the Eurozet radio group, which owns several radio stations, including Poland’s #2 station, Radio Zet.
Big sums paid by Soros-linked NGOs for campaigning against the right on social media
After the Oct. 15 elections, MP Dariusz Matecki, a politician from the Sovereign Poland party, which is a member of the United Right coalition led by Law and Justice that has been governing the country since 2015 (and should soon give way to a coalition led by Donald Tusk), published a list of sums spent by Soros-linked NGOs to promote their often very political posts on Facebook during the electoral campaign.
One such organization alone, the Estonian Amplify App OÜ which is the owner of the Do:łącz Facebook profile, spent 1.5 million zlotys (some 330,000 euros) on Mark Zuckerberg’s social media during the campaign, which is more than any political party spent on Facebook during the same period. Already in June, the conservative wPolityce.pl website raised the alarm about Do:łącz’s sudden activity in Poland and about the identity of Amplify App OÜ’s owner, Hungarian businessman Tibor Dessewffy, “a sociologist who holds an important position at the Brussels-based think tank European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a non-profit organization funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation (OSF).”
Do:łącz’s Facebook posts in the run-up to the Oct. 15 elections were highly political with direct calls to not vote for Law and Justice or the even more right-wing Confederation party.
Another organization linked to the Soros network, Liberté !, allegedly spent over 1.1 million zlotys on Facebook and 135,000 zlotys on YouTube during the Polish electoral campaign. Other big spenders are the Batory Foundation, a Polish foundation created by George Soros in the late 1980s, under communist rule, which is still partly funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and Amnesty International, which also receives funding from OSF.
Matecki only mentioned organizations that are based in Poland, but the US-based left-wing Action for Democracy, which is under investigation in Hungary for its allegedly illegal funding of the opposition’s electoral campaign last year, is also said to have been very active in the run-up to Poland’s elections this year, and it is the Hungarian media who first raised the alarm about this.