Polish parliament’s witty speaker is a viral sensation

As Polish pro-EU parties prepare to take power, a new star has shot to fame: a parliament speaker whose wit has drawn thousands of new followers to the chamber’s social media channels.

Szymon Holownia is no stranger to a wide audience as a former TV personality who notably hosted the Polish edition of the “Got Talent!” franchise.

The 47-year-old left showbusiness for politics four years ago and now enjoys the spotlight chairing plenary proceedings following his success in the Oct.15 parliamentary elections.

“Ladies and gentlemen, stock up on popcorn... because I suspect there will be a lot of action,” Holownia said of the upcoming sitting during one of his now almost daily press conferences.

His quips and comebacks in the plenary have been going viral – including an instance when he corrected a conservative lawmaker for mistakenly calling a colleague a “Jay-Z” instead of a member of Generation Z.

On another occasion, as lawmakers heckled him, Holownia retorted saying they were becoming “a tad monothematic.”

“I encourage you to be more original, to do more intellectual work. Insulting takes skill too,” he said, drawing applause from the pro-EU lawmakers. In the matter of weeks that Holownia has spent as speaker, the parliament’s YouTube channel streaming the debates saw its followers surge almost tenfold, from 45,000 to 435,000 subscribed users.

The sudden rise in popularity of the parliamentary proceedings prompted an unorthodox move by a Warsaw cinema to organise a screening of Monday’s confidence vote for the conservative minority government.

“We’ve never done this before,” Karolina Fornal, a spokeswoman for Kinoteka told AFP, adding the cinema had already run out of free tickets for the screenings.

Agence France-Presse