It cannot be stressed enough how extremely significant PiS’ actions are: we are witnessing the most important events in Polish politics since 1989 that might mean a complete rejection of the democratic mechanisms introduced by governments of Tadeusz Mazowiecki and his successors. One has to remember, that the new statute of the parliament is already […]
Author: Tomasz Oryński
The mutiny of the lemmings
In last month’s parliamentary elections in Poland, the right-wing Law and Justice Party won a clear majority. With the opposition abated, they are now setting their sights on rewriting the constitution and dramatically changing the Polish political system. But will they succeed? This article was written for Visegrad Revue When Visegrad Revue asked me to […]
Poland can’t take chances with PiS
In his recent article in Politico, Adrian Karatnycky calls for Poles to “Give PiS a chance.” They did give PiS a chance, when they elected the party to power about six weeks ago, and it was enough for PiS to completely squander this mandate of trust. The thing is that Poles just don’t trust the […]
Tens of thousands of people protested on the streets in Poland. What is their anger about?
Poles voted Prawo i Sprawiedliwość to power as they believed in their promises of delivering “higher quality of democracy”. But for last month Kaczyński and his party did exactly the opposite. Recent attempts to take over the state institution made Poles really angry. According to different sources, 50 000 to 70 000 people took the […]
Why is Polish youth so right wing?
After presidential and parliamentary elections, Poland found itself in totally new situation. For the first time, there is no left in the parliament and the right wing Prawo i Sprawiedliwość has almost all power in it’s hands. With the weak opposition from crumbling Platforma Obywatelska, newbies from .Nowoczesna and few survivors of Peasant’ party they […]
Kaczyński wins. So does Poland as well?
In last month’s parliamentary elections in Poland, the victorious, right-wing Law and Justice Party made history as the first party to win a majority government in a free election. With the opposition abated, they are now setting their sights on rewriting the constitution and dramatically changing the Polish political system. But will they succeed? This […]
Prawo i Sprawiedliwosć sticks out middle finger to its voters.
The number of the hard line Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice) followers remains constant and it would not be sufficient to ensure its victory. Therefore apart from people’s disaffection to Platforma Obywatelska (Civic Platform), it owes it’s success to the people, who believed in their picture that new people have taken over and Beata Szydło’s […]
Landscape before parliamentary elections in Poland
Oncoming parliamentary election in Poland might be the most significant ones in more than a decade. Andrzej Duda’s victory in presidential elections earlier this year proved that skillfull play on moods of the public, tired with 8 years of Platforma Obywatelska government, fueled with strong smearing campaign might result in such suprising results as a […]
Refugees like us
Although for the few years we managed to maintain a feeling that tragedy in Syria is „someone else’s problem”, today we cannot ignore it any longer – those „someones” are already here, they are at our borders, they camp at the Slovenian borders or try to cross in leaky bathtubs across Mediterrain Sea. So […]
Why Poles in UK get frustrated.
Although it was probably no surprise to anyone that today’s „Polish strike” turned out to be total failure (on demonstration outside Westminster journalists strongly outnumbered protesters), the frustration of some Poles is a fact. Some Britons cannot really see why, after all we are free to settle in this country and are treated nicely and seen […]