Donald Tusk is at the centre of an EU censorship row after seizing control of the country’s state media by sacking "biased" media chiefs.
Poland’s state television news channel has been taken off air after the former European Council president argued it was being used as a voice for the former right-wing government party Law and Justice (PiS).
The shutdown of TVP Info comes a week after Tusk took office following his campaign pledging to deconstruct the broadcaster.
According to Tusk, the heads of the state television, radio and news agencies had been sacked to restore "impartiality".
New prime minister Donald Tusk is at the centre of a censorship row after seizing control of country’s state media by sacking 'biased' media chiefs
GettyHowever, the move has faced backlash from those accusing him of "an illegal takeover."
Former prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki suggested Tusk’s administration is taking "illegal actions" which "show[s] how the authorities that supposedly care about the rule of law violate it at every step."
"What is going on here looks like the situation in Belarus," he said on Wednesday as he arrived at TVP’s headquarters to show his support.
Jarosław Kaczyński, PiS’s leader added: "Our opponents believe that a good citizen is an ill-informed citizen, that the common man should not know anything about the elites. And we, as in many democracies of the world - think exactly the opposite."
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On Wednesday, the new head of TVP's supervisory board, lawyer Piotr Zemla, arrived at the broadcaster's headquarters with the new management and journalists.
"Donald Tusk's government is trying to change the authorities in charge of public media in Poland based on a Sejm resolution," Beata Szydlo, an MEP and former Polish Prime Minister told the Express.
"Sejm resolutions do not provide a legal basis for authorities other than the Sejm. Nevertheless, based on this, Tusk's people broke into the headquarters of Polish Television and claimed that they are now in charge.
"In addition, the authorities immediately stopped the broadcasting of Polish Television, an unprecedented event in Polish history. It is as if the BBC was taken off the air at the request of the Prime Minister."
People protest against changes in publicly-owned media in front of the Provincial Office in Krakow, Poland
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However, Poland’s former Right-wing government has been frequently criticised over its alleged use of state media as its mouthpiece.
Anne Applebaum, an American-Polish journalist, argued: "TVP was illegally turned into a pro-PiS propaganda tube, and was illegally run by PiS functionaries.
"What you are watching is the re-establishment of public broadcasting."
On Tuesday, Tusk said: "The public media as it exists in its current shape does not deserve to be financed from the taxpayer’s pocket at all."
