WARSAW (AFP) — Poland's ultra-Catholic broadcaster Radio Maryja is a crucial mouthpiece and vote-draw for the ruling conservative Kaczynski twins, who return the favour by shielding it from critics.
"This is Radio Maryja, the Catholic voice in your home," the station reminds listeners on the hour, as it serves up a fare of live masses, prayers, slanted news, plus occasional anti-Semitic outbursts by presenters which have gone unpunished by justice authorities or Poland's media watchdog.
The Catholic-nationalist Father Tadeusz Rydyzk, who founded Radio Maryja 16 years ago and has built it into a media empire with a sister television station and newspaper, regularly refuses to speak to foreign journalists or Polish reporters who do not toe his line.
His listeners are fiercely protective of their iconic priest, whom many of them see as victim of repeated attacks by Poland's liberal opposition simply because he wants to defend his faith and the nation, just as the Church was a bulwark against communism.
"The communists assassinated priests, and today the liberals want to kill Rydzyk," said a woman in a recent phone-in show.
The station wields a powerful influence in a country where more than 90 percent of the population of 37.8 million say they are Catholic.
In a sign of Radio Maryja's solid backing for President Lech Kaczynski and his identical twin Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski ahead of parliamentary elections on October 21, their Law and Justice (PiS) party is the only one getting air-time.
"During the European Parliament elections in 2004, Father Rydzyk supported another party, the League of Polish Families (LPR), which picked up almost all his votes," noted Jaroslaw Zbieranek, a political scientist at Poland's Institute of Public Affairs.
"Today, PiS has managed to grab hold of the Radio Maryja electorate," he said.
A study published Friday by PBS GDA polling agency found that 74 percent of listeners will back PiS.
The station's former darling Roman Giertych, the leader of the far-right, ultra-Catholic LPR, which was in a coalition government with PiS until August, now complains about a "lack of pluralism" on its airwaves.
Giertych's party is facing elimination from parliament, because polls show it may not clear the hurdle of five percent of the vote which is required to win seats.
"By betting on Radio Maryja, Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has opted for highly pragmatic strategy. The radio's supporters are disciplined and always turn out to vote," said Zbieranek.
He estimated that the radio could drum up 1.5 million votes for PiS, which opinion polls show is almost neck and neck with the liberal opposition.
A study by the MillwardBrown SMG/KRC survey institute found that Radio Marjya is Poland's fifth most listened-to broadcaster, drawing at some 896,000 people at least once a day.
Besides its on-air backing for PiS, Radio Maryja is also using its highly active listeners' clubs to organise campaign meetings.
At a recent event in the central Polish city of Piotrkow Trybunalski, the seasoned Kaczynski loyalist Antoni Macierewicz worked a crowd of around 40 mostly elderly people.
"The Soviets are still eating away at our country. We must snatch the country from their claws," said Macierewicz, who has steered efforts to track down former supporters -- real and purported -- of the communist regime which fell in 1989.
"Only the Kaczynskis' party can do this," he said.
Outraged by the heavy-handed politicking of Radio Maryja, which officially falls under the authority of the Church, some members of Poland's Catholic hierarchy, such as Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz of Krakow, have demanded that the station change tack.
But Jaroslaw Kaczynski has not shied away from criticising Dziwisz's comments, even though the archbishop was the closest confidant of Poland's beloved Pope John Paul II.
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