The world should learn from Poland's tragedy: restoring democracy is even harder than creating it | Timothy Garton Ash
The world should learn from Poland's tragedy: restoring democracy is even harder than creating it | Timothy Garton Ash
After eight years of populist chaos, Donald Tusk must rebuild trust in the state and resist the urge to simply turn the tables, says Guardian columnist Timothy Garton Ash
I think Poland is tracking a couple of years ahead of those of us further west, so it's useful for us to see how you resolve the damage the right wing populists have caused. I think many of us will face the same problem in the future.
Good luck guys.
Most are happy to see PiS being removed forcibly from every institution they're entrenched in but it is yet to be seen if we can actually get the proverbial genie back into the bottle. Public TV is now in much better place but is quite strongly pro government policies, just not in absurdly propagandist way. The way takeover was done is rather debatable too.
this all was made easier by the fact that PiS didn't seriously consider that they would lose elections, some pooling they did even indicated they'd get constitutional majority
That, and they took over institutions without care for actual law, in some cases it made easier to take them over after the last elections, but mostly created huge mess, two parallel legal realities and soured relations with EU massively. Don't count on either in other countries, your far-right/alt-right can be more competent
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Two former ministers of the previously ruling Law and Justice (PiS) government, convicted of the falsification of documents while in public office, take refuge in the palace of the president, their party comrade Andrzej Duda.
Its new-style news programmes are incomparably more impartial (I’ve been watching them), but even a legal scholar highly critical of PiS characterises the steps taken to achieve this good result as “revolutionary moves”.
The name-calling gets ever louder, but the new coalition government headed by Donald Tusk, a former prime minister (from 2007 to 2014) and president of the European Council (from 2014 to 2019), continues to purge PiS’s strongholds of embedded state power with what this formidable politician has called “an iron broom”.
Most obviously, there’s the difficulty of restoring the institutions of a liberal democracy, built from scratch on the ruins of a Soviet-type system after 1989 and then subject to systematic demolition after 2015, when PiS came to power, but with the country remaining a member of the European Union.
A stable liberal democracy depends on a basic social consensus around the legitimacy of key institutions such as parliament, presidency, independent courts and free media.
Instead of playing the vital role of a neutral head of state during a difficult political transition, he has become even more partisan, offering convicted criminals refuge in the presidential palace and bleating fatuous hyperbole.
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