Enlarge image
Poland's President Duda
Photo: Andrzej Lange / EPA
Tens of thousands of people protested against a new broadcasting law in Poland over the past week.
Now President Andrzej Duda has vetoed the controversial bill.
Duda himself announced this in a televised address.
The law is unpopular with many in the country, he said.
He also feared that it could damage Poland as a business location.
Opponents of the law had hoped that Duda would make use of his right of veto.
The law now goes back to the Sejm, the first chamber of parliament.
It has to be revised there and then goes back to the Senate and President.
The media law was approved ten days ago by 228 members of parliament.
The national-conservative government in Warsaw had argued that it protected the Polish media landscape from potentially hostile actors.
Critics accused the government of the right-wing nationalist ruling party Law and Justice (PiS), on the other hand, of wanting to use the law to silence the government-critical news channel TVN24.
TVN24 is the news channel of the Polish private broadcaster TVN, which belongs to the US media group Discovery.
The law would have banned non-European companies from owning more than 49 percent of Polish media companies.
If the law went into effect, Discovery would have been forced to sell the majority of its shares in TVN.
Sharp criticism from the US and the EU
There had been protests against the law in Poland.
The US and the EU also sharply criticized the law.
A spokesman for the EU Commission in Brussels described it as a "serious threat to freedom of the press and pluralism in Poland".
The Discovery group warned against undermining the "values that bound Europe with Poland."
The PiS already controls the public TV broadcaster TVP as well as a large part of the regional press.
Since the party came into power in Poland, the country has fallen 46 places on the world press freedom index.
asc / AFP / AP
