<
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/09/poland-election-democracy-populism-autocracy/675255/>
"In Poland, next month’s parliamentary elections may be the opposition’s last,
best chance to stop the country’s slide into autocracy. Along with Hungary,
Poland once counted as a paradigmatic success story for a postcommunist
transition to democracy. But also like Hungary, that reputation started to sour
when far-right populists surged to power in the 2010s.
What happens in Poland is the more consequential because it is by far the
largest Central or Eastern European country in the European Union. Its
location—bordering Ukraine, Belarus, the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, and
the Baltic Sea—gives it immense geopolitical importance. It has a more powerful
military than neighboring Germany. And according to some projections, its GDP
per capita is even set to overtake Britain’s by the end of the decade.
The populist Law and Justice party secured a majority in Poland’s Parliament,
and won the largely ceremonial presidency, in 2015. Soon after, Jarosław
Kaczyński, the party’s leader, who is widely understood to exercise the real
power in the land, held a long meeting with Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor
Orbán—and promptly went to work implementing his playbook.
A decade ago, most political scientists thought of Hungary as a consolidated
democracy, a country whose economic prosperity and political institutions were
sufficiently robust to weather almost any challenge. In the country today, few
independent media outlets remain, key political institutions are under the
control of partisan hacks, and Orbán exerts tremendous sway over social and
cultural life."
Via
What Could Go Right? September 14, 2023
<
https://theprogressnetwork.org/air-travel-safety-accessibility-improvements/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
