Looking back on ups and downs of the passing year, in vitro debate continues and a law on actors.

Weekly press reviewed by Krystyna Kolosowska

Wprost prints a review of the most important developments in Poland and in the world in 2008. On the home scene it recalls the tragic air crash in which four crew members and sixteen passengers, high ranking air force officers, were killed. That was in January. On the opposite side of the time scale – in December – the Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama, the EC chief Jose Manuel Barroso and French President Nicolas Sarkozy attended events in Poland marking the 25th anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize for Lech Walesa, the legendary Solidarity leader and former president. Among international developments, the weekly highlights the victory of Democrat Barack Obama in the US presidential elections. He won twice as many votes as his Republican rival John McCain and will be the first Afro-American to hold this post, Wprost says with emphasis.

Newsweek presents the winners and losers of 2008. The latter are victims of excessive borrowing and too much self-confidence, says the weekly, listing in this group Bernard Madoff, the Wall Street legend, Richard Fuld, the president of Lehman Brothers, and among Polish business tycoons – Ryszard Krauze, the king of Polish IT technology and Leszek Czarnecki, who created Getin Holding, specializing in banking, insurance and leasing services. But there are entrepreneurs, who displayed an excellent feel of the market, proving that a financially and organizationally strong firm can grow despite the global recession. Among them is the owner of Polsat Television, Zygmunt Solorz-Zak. In April, his Digital Polsat made a debut on the stock exchange and immediately joined the billionaires’ club. A few weeks later the capital market collapsed, but Solorz already had cash to launch his Polsat news channel. The assets of his firms are valued at 2.1 billion zlotys, 18 percent more than in April. This is a record result on the Warsaw stock exchange. A good case in point is Artur Kawa. His Emperia holding has been buying small, regional food shop chains, which had difficulties in withstanding the competition of foreign supermarkets. During the first three quarters of the year, he opened new distribution centers and news shops across Poland, built franchising chains. Now, Emperia is the fourth biggest chain of food shops here and the biggest one with Polish capital.

Solidarnosc writes that three out of four Poles are happy and satisfied with their life. At the same time about a half of those surveyed by the OBOP polling agency have to borrow money. One third of Polish households are permanently indebted. A life saver, for many Poles, is work abroad, though recession in Britain and the USA is making it less and less profitable. This year, Polish migrant workers have channeled a total of 6 billion euros to their home country – which is the equivalent of Poland’s budget deficit. Poles work the average of 45 and a half hours a week, compared with 43 hours spent at work by the British people or 40 hours – by the French. This shows how false the stereotype of the grumpy and complaining Pole is. Almost 80 percent of us declare optimism. Also , over 80 percent say that Poland benefited from joining the European Union, compared with about 50 percent of Poles who voiced pro-European sentiments in May 2004, the time of accession. This upward swing is not surprising. Poland has made major strides in reducing the gap between it and the old EU member states. Hopefully, the economic slowdown will not hold back this trend.

Gosc Niedzielny abhors the idea of in vitro conception. We live at a time when man can be produced in glass, it writes. Then, such a man – regardless of the fact that he is in an embryonic state – can be frozen and kept for years in a special container. In this situation great responsibility falls on Polish parliamentarians. Work on the bio-ethics law is entering the decisive stage, the weekly goes on to say. Its final shape will largely depend on public declarations of individual deputies. If out of 460 parliamentarians there are many who would declare that they will only support legislation which closes this Pandora’s Box, the legislators would have to take this into consideration. 

Przekroj ridicules the idea put forward by the Polish Peasant Party MPs to pass a law on the actors’ profession. They proposed a draft, which says that only someone who completed higher acting studies can be an actor. An exception to the rule may be persons who passed an exam before a ministerial commission. Having earned the right to call themselves actors, representatives of this profession would have to meet tough requirements, for example, learn their part by heart at a reasonably fast speed. A penalty is envisaged for exceeding the time limit. But there is also good news. If the film or theatre director violates the contract provisions or good acting customs, the actor has the right to compensation.