POLAND is giving Europe a headache. Since the socially conservative and mildly Eurosceptic Law and Justice party (PiS in Polish) won the parliamentary elections on October 25th, the country has gone from being the poster child of European integration to enfant terrible. The new government has defied the European Union’s warnings, pushing through laws that critics see as weakening constitutional checks and balances and media freedom. Centrists and liberals warn of “Orbanisation”, fearing that Poland is following the illiberal path of Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister.If the EU can put up with rule-breaking in Hungary, why does it mind more about Poland? Chiefly because Poland matters more: it is the EU’s sixth-largest economy and the biggest of the ex-communist countries that joined the bloc in 2004. It is a frontline state, with a border with Russia and will host the NATO summit in July. The EU needs Polish help on climate change (it is a big coal producer).How far is the criticism actually justified?PiS is the first party to govern Poland alone since the fall of communism. Its victory stems more from disgust with the previous government, a coalition led by the centrist Civic Platform (PO), which had been in power since 2007. But PiS won the election by promising moderate change, not revolution, and it sidelined its most controversial figure, the party leader ...
The Economist explains: Why is Poland’s government worrying the EU?
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Poland and the EU: On the naughty step
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Migrant men and European women
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Poland and the EU
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Sticking up for media freedom
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A slap on the wrist for Poland is a big test for the European Union
Sticking up for media freedom
POLAND is in trouble with Brussels. On January 13th the European Commission launched a formal assessment of whether changes to the constitutional tribunal and public media pushed through by Poland’s new government, led by the Eurosceptic Law and Justice party (PiS), violate the rule of law. The commission is wielding new enforcement powers; in the worst case, Poland’s voting rights in the EU could be suspended. The move has “nothing to do with politics”, claimed Frans Timmermans, the first vice-president of the commission. But a big political fall-out looks likely.
Since coming to power in October PiS has strengthened its grip over the security ...
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Politics this week
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Mexican marines recaptured Joaquín Guzmán, also known as El Chapo (Shorty), the boss of the Sinaloa drug gang, who had escaped from a high-security prison last July. Security forces raided a house, fought a gun battle in which five people died and tracked down Mr Guzmán after he had slipped away through a tunnel. Mexican officials said a meeting in October between El Chapo and Sean Penn, an American film star, in a jungle hideout had helped them trace the fugitive. See article.
Venezuela’s Supreme Court ruled that actions by the National Assembly, the first with an opposition majority in 17 years, will be “absolutely null” because the legislature had sworn in three opposition MPs in defiance of an earlier court judgment. The three MPs duly stood down, reducing the opposition’s majority to below the two-thirds needed to summon a convention to rewrite the constitution.
Meanwhile Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, reshuffled his cabinet. Luis Salas, a left-wing sociologist who ...
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Politics this week
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Sanctions on Iran were lifted after the regime was found to be in compliance with its obligations to dismantle parts of its nuclear programme. Yet America almost immediately imposed a new set of sanctions on companies and people linked to Iran’s ballistic-missile programme. Iran also freed four Iranian-Americans it had held prisoner, including a reporter from the Washington Post, in exchange for seven Iranians held in America. See article.
The UN said that Islamic State has enslaved as many as 3,500 people in Iraq. Most of these are women and children from the minority Yazidi community. Speaking in Paris, America’s defence secretary, Ashton Carter, said America and six other countries were stepping up their military campaign against IS in Iraq and Syria.
Members of the two main factions in Libya’s civil war formed a unity government as part of a peace process brokered by the UN. But several militias in control of different parts of the country, including some in the two main factions, rejected the ...
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On Saudi Arabia, rating police, tax, David Bowie, investing, Merkel, Poland: Letters to the editor
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Who’s afraid of cheap oil?
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On Saudi Arabia, rating police, tax, David Bowie, investing, Merkel, Poland
Saudi Arabia’s problem
Your briefing on the Saudi regime’s blueprint for survival undervalued the comparative dimension (“Young prince in a hurry”, January 9th). In a globalising world where transnational economic ties, information technologies, migration, awareness of what is going on in different parts of the world and the chipping away of borders affect ever greater parts of societies, authoritarian or “strongman” regimes are vulnerable to rapidly shifting pressures.
It may appear that such regimes can bring stability to unevenly fragmenting countries, but they become even more dependent on rents, especially from resources (the “resource curse”) and on cheap exports, cheap labour and the like. Maintaining these comparative advantages often requires repression and austerity. They therefore have to deal with vicious cycles of disillusionment, resentment and ethnic divisions that spill across borders.
When these bottom-up pressures mesh with uneven ...
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Illiberal central Europe: Big, bad Visegrad
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The brawl begins
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Illiberal central Europe
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The migration crisis has given an unsettling new direction to an old alliance
WHEN Middle Eastern refugees began arriving in Europe last year, Martina Scheibova, a consultant in Prague, felt sympathy for them. Now she is less sure. They create a “clash of cultures”, she says anxiously. Such fears are shared by many Europeans. But unlike Germans or Swedes, Ms Scheibova is unlikely to encounter many refugees. Czech public opinion is solidly against taking in asylum-seekers; Milos Zeman, the Czech Republic’s populist president, calls Muslim refugees “practically impossible” to integrate. In the past year, the country has accepted just 520.
The backlash against refugees can be felt across Europe. Xenophobic parties are at record levels in ...
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Lech Walesa: Espionage charges show how bitter Poland’s politics remains
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Conservatives and liberals are still struggling over the meaning of Poland’s post-communist transition
LECH WALESA, the iconic leader of the Solidarity labour movement that brought down Poland’s communist regime, was blessed with a lucky streak. In the early 1970s, when he was a humble electrician at the Gdansk shipyards, he bought a television set and a washing machine with money won in the lottery, his wife later recalled in her memoirs. But files released this week suggest he may have been getting extra money from a different source. The documents, spanning the years 1970 to 1976, indicate that Mr Walesa was a paid informant for the communist secret police. The allegations are not new, dating back to the early 1990s, when Mr Walesa was president. That they have returned to the spotlight says less about Mr Walesa than about how Polish politics remains divided over the meaning of the 1989 revolution.
The files were found last week at the home ...
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European fiction: Olga Tokarczuk’s Polish narrative
LAST week at Cambridge University, a bestselling novelist discussed a 900-page book that no one can yet read in English. Published in 2014, “Ksiegi Jakubowe” (“The Books of Jacob”) tells the story of a cultist Jewish figure, Jacob Frank, in 18th-century Poland. Its author, 53-year-old Olga Tokarczuk, is now under the angry glare of many of her countrymen.
20160310 15:47:50
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Poland and the Venice Commission: Poland’s government faces another test
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Poland and the Venice Commission
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On March 11th the Venice Commission will look at changes to the constitutional tribunal
SINCE coming to power in October last year, Poland’s new government has caused plenty of controversy. One of the biggest changes pushed through by the government in December, to the constitutional tribunal, has proved particularly contentious.
One of the changes to the tribunal means that all verdicts need to be approved by a two-thirds majority, rather than just a simple majority. Critics fear this will make it harder for the government’s opponents to query legislation: in order to do so they would have to have the support of one of the judges from the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party to qualify. On March 9th the tribunal itself deemed the changes to be unconstitutional.
Then on March 11th the Venice Commission, an advisory body to the Council of Europe (which predates the European Union and is the guardian of the European Convention ...
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Visualising Braille: Retraining our brains
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Visualising Braille
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Reading Braille is a tactile activity. But an experiment by researchers at Jagiellonian University in Poland shows that sighted people can coax the visual part of their brains to read it
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20160318
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Poland marks 20 years of OECD membership
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The new normal
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Review: “Les Innocentes”: A new film is a stark exploration of the position of women in wartime
MAY 1945 was the end of the second world war in Europe, but for many people east of the Elbe, the fear did not end then. “Les Innocentes” (also called “Agnus Dei”), a new Franco-Polish film directed by Anne Fontaine, opens at a convent in Poland in December 1945. The nuns were raped repeatedly by advancing Soviet troops; “I can still smell their odour”, one of them says later. At least seven are pregnant. Their only hope is Mathilde, a young French doctor played by Lou de Laâge, who is in Poland with the Red Cross. What follows is less a bold statement about the Catholic Church. It is a sadly universal tale of women in wartime, who this time happen to be nuns.
20160323 15:00:14
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Thu, 2016-04-07
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What Europeans think of each other: Green-eyed continent
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The new normal
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What Europeans think of each other
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Europeans have warped views of their neighbours—and themselves
“THE grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” originates from a Latin phrase, quoted by Ovid, to do with envying another man’s fruitful harvest. Fittingly, modern day Italians also have a chlorophyll-tinted view of their neighbours. According to new data from Livewhat, a Geneva-based survey, Ovid’s successors tend to believe that life is better in other countries than the locals do. Over 70% of Italians imagine life to be good in France, when asked to rate it on a scale from one to ten, whereas only 43% of the French have the same opinion.
The Italians are a self-critical bunch, but romanticised views of other countries are widely held in Europe. In all of the countries surveyed, more people believe that life in France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland is better than those countries’ own citizens reckon.
This creates odd perceptions, built on mutual ...
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Asylum-seekers in Europe: A proper comparison might show Italy is more hospitable to refugees than Sweden
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European countries’ acceptance rates say more about where migrants come from than where they are headed
THE latest European asylum statistics seem to offer good news for refugees. They show the acceptance rate jumping by ten percentage points to 60% in the final quarter of 2015—the highest rate ever. Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands all granted asylum in record numbers. It would seem that Europeans are finally greeting migrants with open arms.
Yet a closer look suggests the news is promising for only a handful of nationalities. The reason acceptance rates have soared is that applications have risen from countries whose refugees are likely to be accepted. Syrians, Eritreans and Iraqis, who are let in more than 90% of the time, make up almost half of all decisions, up from about a quarter in 2014. For other countries the acceptance rate was just 28%, and there has been no jump.
By the same ...
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Charlemagne: The politics of memory
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Charlemagne
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Poland had been coming to terms with its past. Now the government wants to bury it again
DARIUSZ STOLA, the owlish director of Polin, the museum of Jewish life in Warsaw, remembers when Jewish sections first started to appear in bookshops in Poland. “I thought it would fade out,” he says. It didn’t. Instead, over the past two decades Poland has become a place where the nation’s past, in particular its relationship to the 3m Polish Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, is debated more vigorously by politicians, intellectuals and ordinary people. Many bookshops now have a section on Polish-Jewish history; since it opened in 2013, Polin has become one of the capital’s most popular museums.
This debate may now be under threat. The Polish government, led by Law and Justice, a radical nationalist party, appears intent on politicising historical ...
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Abortion in Poland: No exceptions
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Beautiful minds, wasted
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Abortion in Poland
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PRENZLAU AND WARSAW
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Not their idea of Law and Justice
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A proposed ban pits pro-choice women against the government and the church
Not their idea of Law and Justice
IT TOOK Anna four weeks to make up her mind. A Catholic from Poland’s conservative south, she already has three children, the youngest just seven months old, and says she could not afford a fourth. Abortion is illegal in Poland except in cases of rape, severe prenatal defects or when the mother’s life is at risk, so Anna and her partner found a clinic in Germany. On a fairly typical day early this April, she was one of six Polish women who underwent abortions at the hospital in Prenzlau, a town north-east of Berlin.
Poland’s abortion restrictions are already among the tightest in Europe, but they may be about to get tighter. ...
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Eastern Europe: Backwards and forwards
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Eastern Europe
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Before there was immigration there was emigration
The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World. By Tara Zahra. W.W. Norton; 392 pages; $28.95 and £18.99.
EASTERN Europe is in the midst of a migration panic. Milos Zeman, the Czech Republich’s president, has called the influx of refugees to the continent an “organised invasion”; Jaroslaw Kaczynski, chairman of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, warns that they may be carrying “very dangerous diseases”. But anxieties about migration in the region are nothing new. In 1890 a lawyer in Galicia described it as “one of the most important, burning problems of the day”. Yet as Tara Zahra recounts in “The Great Departure”, a perceptive history of migration and eastern Europe, until very recently that problem was not immigration but emigration.
In the late ...
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Poland’s rightist revolution: Red and white cavalry
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How to measure prosperity
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Poland’s rightist revolution
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Jockeying for political advantage
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The Law and Justice party purges a horse farm, and much else
Jockeying for political advantage
THERE is no evidence that Marek Skomorowski had ever worked with horses professionally before he was appointed to head one of the most elite stables in Poland, a 199-year-old state-owned stud farm in the village of Janow Podlaski. He had a degree in economics; his main credential seemed to be his connection to a small right-wing party allied to the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS), which took power last autumn. The director whom he replaced was an experienced breeder. “The horses haven’t succumbed to depression,” Mr Skomorowski quipped after taking over the job in February. He spoke too soon. By early April two mares owned by Shirley Watts, ...
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Visual culture: Romek Marber’s iconic illustration for Penguin and The Economist
IT WAS 1960 when Romek Marber—a young designer in The Economist’s art department—received a phone call that would change his career. “He speaks with a strong foreign accent but his accent is not as bad as yours,” said a secretary, while apologising for distributing Mr Marber’s number to an unidentified man. That conversation was a golden ticket: an invitation by Germano Facetti, the art director of Penguin Books, to design the covers of the new Penguin Crime Series.
20160511 14:52:24
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Thu, 2016-05-26
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Politics this week
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Under attack
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Industrial unrest spread throughout France. A week after a blockade of oil refineries led to panic at the petrol pumps, the country was crippled by another round of strikes, as transport workers joined the picket lines. The dispute, over the government’s modest reforms to loosen labour-market restrictions, has pitted unionised workers against the Socialist government of François Hollande. See here and here.
The UN’s refugee agency reported that at least 880 migrants were feared drowned in a single week in the Mediterranean. In the first five months of 2016, 2,510 had died trying to make the crossing to Europe, up by 35% compared with the same period last year.
In Brussels the European Commission issued a formal objection to changes made by the Polish government in December to Poland’s constitutional court, which potentially endanger the rule of law. The government, led by the Eurosceptical Law and Justice party, now has to address the criticisms; failure to do so could lead to sanctions or to Poland losing its ...
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