Before the U.S. presidential election, it seemed like no one but Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters believed he could win. After all, the man is a convicted felon, a putschist-provocateur, an agent of chaos, and a walking scandal who has been disowned by almost all his former advisors, some
One year after a coalition led by Donald Tusk defeated Poland’s right-wing ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), the mood in the country is subdued. While a victory by pro-democracy parties in a free, but decidedly unfair, election was necessary, it was not sufficient to eliminate the illiberal populist
There is a saying in Poland that, “No one will die for Gdansk.” No matter what kind of security guarantees Poland gets from Western countries, most Poles believe that we will still have to fend for ourselves. After all, when the Nazis invaded in 1939, Poland had security guarantees from
As Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine rages on, the stability of neighboring Belarus, which has been backing Russia's aggression, appears to be fracturing. Has Russian President Vladimir Putin's war of aggression opened a Pandora's box for a regime that is practically a remote wing of the Kremlin? Recall that, in
Immediately after World War II, the Paris-exiled Polish intellectual Jerzy Giedroyc (of Lithuanian origins, born in Minsk) coined a phrase that would come to define Poland’s foreign policy toward its eastern neighbors: “There will be no independent Poland without an independent Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine.” Since the fall of
Although local elections often don’t make international news headlines or involve widely recognizable household names, anyone who cares about the state of liberal democracy would do well to pay attention to them. In Turkey, for example, recent elections not only revealed widespread dissatisfaction with the country’s autocratic president,
It has been a month since Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government took office, and the task now is to rebuild Polish democracy after eight years of corrupt misrule under Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice (PiS) party. No country in Europe has ever faced a political transition quite
WARSAW – This week, Donald Tusk won a vote of confidence in Poland’s parliament to lead a new government as the country’s new prime minister, following a failed bid by the incumbent, Mateusz Morawiecki to remain in that role. The vote provoked a visibly nervous reaction from the leader
WARSAW – In October, Polish voters demonstrated that even extremely unequal elections against authoritarian incumbents can be won. The opposition’s victory, and the country’s subsequent re-democratization, may hold useful lessons for like-minded forces in Hungary, Turkey, and elsewhere. In Poland, the defeated populist leader, Jarosław Kaczyński of Law and
WARSAW – This wasn’t supposed to happen. With sweeping control over state financial resources and public and local media, Poland’s populist ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), had a massive structural advantage in this month’s parliamentary election. It should have won handily and continued consolidating its illiberal, anti-democratic
WARSAW – There is a growing belief that Poland will soon have Europe’s strongest army. Poland’s ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), has not missed any opportunity to drum this message home, and one increasingly hears it being echoed abroad, too. But is it true? The claim largely rests
Even though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently honored the victims of a 1943 massacre of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists, some Poles still think their country is owed an apology. Worse, such demands are symptomatic of a broader embrace of messianic victimhood that has taken hold in recent years. WARSAW – July
