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DONALD TUSK’S appointment as president of the European Council in 2014 seemed to cap Poland’s journey to the heart of the European Union. Twenty-five years after the collapse of communism and a decade after Poland led the accession of eight former Soviet-bloc countries to the EU, its prime minister was elevated by his peers to one of the most senior posts in Brussels. It was hard to imagine a more potent sign of the healing of Europe’s post-war scars.
The job of council president, which involves chairing summits of European leaders and channelling their tempestuous debates into compromise, is a profound test of political nous. Not everyone was happy with Mr Tusk’s early performance; some thought he was operating more like the Polish prime minister he was from 2007-14 than the consensus-seeking European they sought. But most came around as Mr Tusk coolly shepherded the EU through a series of sticky situations, from a Greek bail-out to the refugee crisis to Brexit. His election to a second two-and-a-half-year ...
The other President Donald: Poland fails by 27-1 to oust Donald Tusk as president of the European Council
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Pyromaniac politics: Poland has reinforced its position as Europe’s problem child
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At home and abroad, the Polish government is ever more difficult
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DONALD TUSK’S appointment as president of the European Council in 2014 seemed to complete Poland’s journey to the heart of the European Union. A decade after Poland led the accession of eight former Soviet-bloc countries, its prime minister was elevated to one of the most senior posts in Brussels. The job involves chairing summits of European leaders and forging compromise from their debates. At first some thought Mr Tusk operated more ...
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Letters: Letters to the editor
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On Yemen, sex studies, India, Wales, Singapore, Poland, brains, April’s Fool
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As Turkey votes on a new constitution, it is sliding into dictatorship
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War in Yemen
Regarding your article on Yemen (“Beggar thy neighbour”, March 25th), I want to make it clear that Saudi Arabia is leading an international coalition, with the full backing of the UN Security Council, to restore the country’s legitimate government. Saudi Arabia does not want to be at war in Yemen. But the alternative is to turn our back and allow it to become a lawless state in the hands of rebel groups and terrorists.
We are doing everything in our power to mitigate the impact of the conflict on Yemeni civilians. We have provided more than $560m worth of humanitarian assistance, working with the UN and international NGOs to ensure aid is distributed to all parts of the country. The coalition is providing inspection-free access for aid ships from trusted organisations to Yemeni ports. Since April 2015 Yemen has ...
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Charlemagne: Europhiles happy about France should worry about Poland
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Illiberalism lives
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Charlemagne
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IT IS crucial to keep Siemiatycze pretty, says Piotr Siniakowicz, the mayor, himself resplendent in bright-blue suit and silk pocket-square. The border with Belarus is a hop and a skip away, so this small town in eastern Poland may mark visitors’ first encounter with the European Union. Siemiatycze brims with well-maintained nursery schools and a gleaming sports centre, thanks to EU funds lavished on the region since Poland joined in 2004. Remittances from thousands of émigrés in Belgium have poured into handsome houses, and businesses depend on those who return for holidays: ...
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Who loves EU, baby: Europe’s anti-nationalist backlash
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Among young, well-educated urbanites, nationalism is provoking a backlash
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Who loves EU, baby
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The new Europhiles
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The policy designed to make America great again
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Who loves EU, baby
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BERLIN
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The EUth of today
The EUth of today
“AU NOM de l’amitié” (“In the name of friendship”), proclaimed banners at the weekly Pulse of Europe demonstration in a Berlin square, a week before France’s presidential election. Edith Piaf songs burbled from giant speakers. Amid a sea of blue-and-yellow European Union flags, the 1,500 marchers gushed about the European project. “I love Europe, it’s my home,” said Oli. “I want my children and grandchildren to experience, study and travel ...
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Letters: Letters to the editor
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On data, France, Poland, Theresa May, Silicon Valley, Donald Trump
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Data driven
You are right to focus on the role of data as the central reason for the growing power of the internet giants (“The world’s most valuable resource”, May 6th). Part of the reason for this is the lax attitude in America on data protection. This has allowed not only huge concentrations of economic power (now transformed into political power) but also rocketing levels of data breaches, financial fraud and identity theft.
Giant companies capture markets in the internet economy through non-price mechanisms. Value is found not in the sale of a product to a customer, but the extraction of personal data from the individual and its repurposing for advertising. There is little internet users can do to make meaningful choices. They are the commodity. Markets, in the traditional sense, do not exist.
But your proposal to share data more widely seems flawed. Startups ...
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Back on the menu: Poland’s liberal opposition is re-establishing itself
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“IN EUROPE, one is either at the table or on the table, being eaten,” Grzegorz Schetyna told an audience of a hundred or so people last week in the sleepy southwestern Polish town of Legnica. Mr Schetyna, the leader of the centre-right Civic Platform (PO) party, was there to convince voters that only his party can return stability and international respect to Poland, after a year and a half under an increasingly illiberal nationalist government. In part that means assuring voters that PO will defend “normality, rule of law and democracy” inside the country. But it also means talking about the European Union, affirming the need to repair Poland’s reputation and bargaining position in Brussels, and perhaps trying to catch a bit of the pro-EU wave that has shown up recently in elections in the Netherlands and France.
Before PO was ousted by the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party in late 2015, it had been in power for eight years. ...
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Poland is one what?: Poland’s illiberal Law and Justice party is still on top
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ON JULY 1ST, about 1,000 dark-suited delegates squeezed into a school sports hall in Przysucha, a small town 100km south of Warsaw, for the national congress of the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party. Since coming to power in 2015, the right-wing party and its leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, have packed the constitutional tribunal with their own loyalists, transformed the public broadcaster into a propaganda mouthpiece for the government and clashed with the European Commission over migration policy and the rule of law. The country’s nativist lurch has outraged liberals and divided Polish society. The party congress’s slogan, “Poland is one”, seemed like an Orwellian attempt to deny the split, or perhaps to rub it in.
Mr Kaczynski, who turned 68 last month, was in high spirits. From the podium he enumerated PiS’s successes, such as reducing child poverty and improving tax collection. He also ran through new projects for which the ...
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Nationalists unite: Donald Trump’s speech could have been written by Poland’s populists
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“THE fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” Donald Trump declared on July 6th, standing in front of a monument commemorating the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis in 1944. In a speech that recalled his inaugural address, when he invoked the prospect of “American carnage,” Mr Trump asked whether we have the courage to protect our borders and to preserve our civilisation in the face of “those who would subvert and destroy it”.
To some, Mr Trump’s speech may have sounded like typical American grandiloquence. In fact, with its echoes of Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilisations, it was a dramatic departure. Earlier American administrations defined “the West” with reference to values such as democracy, liberty and respect for human rights. Mr Trump and many of his advisers, including the speech’s authors, Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller, apparently see it as rooted in ethnicity, culture and religion. When George W. Bush visited Poland for his first presidential visit, in 2001, he ...
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Art imitating life: Dark times, reflected in weighty films at Karlovy Vary
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THE Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF), known as a springboard for Central and Eastern European films that go on to wider acclaim, takes place in an immaculate west Bohemian spa town formerly known by its German moniker Carlsbad. But amid the pastel palaces cascading down the wooded hillsides and the healing waters below, politics past and present made for a gritty tone on screens in the festival’s 52nd incarnation, which finished on July 8th.A group of veterans from assorted Yugoslav republics gather to discuss their war experiences in an off-season Bosnian ski hotel as a part of a group therapy programme in “Men Don’t Cry” ("Muskarci koji ne placu", pictured), which took home the special jury award. All of them are dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, and most bring a predilection for downing pills with a dose of rakia, the ubiquitous Balkan homemade fruit brandy. As each man takes turns recounting memories of his war experience, tempers flare. It later emerges that one, a Serb named Miki, played by Boris Isakovic, had a prominent, albeit passive, role in a massacre. Against the backdrop of snowless slopes, the characters’ best seasons look to have passed them by: Alen Drljevic's film concludes with the group stopped at a roadside gas station as a bus packed with ...
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Teutonic tremors: Germany fears Donald Trump will divide Europe
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IN THE aftermath of the G20 summit on July 7th and 8th, German politicians traded blows over who was at fault for riots by anti-globalisation activists that smashed up parts of central Hamburg. But a big global event in the heart of a city with a strong anarchist tradition was always bound to prompt protests. Officials’ deeper reasons for anxiety were different: Donald Trump and his attitudes towards Russia and Poland.
To some in Berlin, the president’s meeting with Vladimir Putin was ...
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Dependent judiciary: Poland’s government is putting the courts under its control
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The opposition tests its candle power
CHOPIN played in the background and, as night fell, the crowd on the square in front of the Supreme Court in Warsaw sang the Polish national anthem. Someone projected “This is our court” onto the building’s wall. Two weeks earlier, in the same square, Donald Trump had hailed Poland’s role in the defence of Western values. But for the demonstrators who turned out on July 16th to protest against changes to the ...
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The Economist explains: How Poland’s government is weakening democracy
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POLAND was the big success story of Europe after 1989. Its peaceful transition from communism, culminating in membership of the European Union in 2004, was an example for countries farther east to emulate. But recently, it has been backsliding. Since coming to power in 2015, the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS in Polish) has been weakening democratic checks and balances. PiS has followed in the footsteps of Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, whom its leader openly admires. Brussels has struggled to respond effectively. Yet Poland is too big to lose: it is a frontline country on NATO’s eastern edge and will be the EU’s seventh-largest economy after Brexit. What is PiS doing? PiS came to power promising change after eight years in opposition. Shortly before the elections, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, its divisive leader, called for “a reconstruction of the state”. In practice, that has meant subordinating it to PiS. The party has used its majority in parliament to push through controversial laws, though it does not have enough seats to formally change the constitution. The prime minister, Beata Szydlo, has little clout. From PiS’s headquarters in Warsaw, Mr Kaczynski pulls the strings. PiS acted swiftly, echoing earlier changes in Hungary. Its first targets were the ...
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Policing the club: What can the EU do to punish Poland?
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IN THE mid-1990s, as the European Union began expanding eastwards, its politicians faced a tricky question. To join the bloc, countries had to commit to democratic standards, human rights and the rule of law. The EU had a lot of leverage over aspiring members. But what if a country turned its back on those values once it got in?
Article 7 was the EU’s answer. A version of it first appeared in the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1999. Governments that violated the union’s fundamental values would be threatened with sanctions, including the suspension of voting rights. Austria had been one of the ...
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Objection sustained: A veto gives the rule of law in Poland a reprieve
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FROM the mountain resort of Zakopane in the south to the Hel peninsula in the north, tens of thousands of Poles took to the streets last week in protest against proposed reforms that would have sacked all of the members of the Supreme Court and politicised the legal system. In Warsaw thousands marched night after night, holding candles and chanting “konstytucja!” (constitution). Even in the eastern city of Lublin, where the inhabitants tend to support the ...
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Politics this week
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America imposed sanctions on 13 Venezuelan officials ahead of a planned election to a constituent assembly, which will have the power to rewrite Venezuela’s constitution. The sanctions freeze the American assets of the army chief, the interior minister and the head of the electoral commission among others and bar American companies from doing business with them. Critics of the Venezuelan regime say it will use the proposed constituent assembly to snuff out democracy. The opposition called a 48-hour strike to protest against it.
A show of force
Chinese and Russian warships staged a joint exercise in the Baltic Sea, their first together in those waters. Their navies have stepped up co-operation in recent years. They have also staged war games in the South China Sea and the Mediterranean. China wants to show that its navy can operate far afield; both countries also share a resentment of American naval ...
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Plugging the gap: Ukrainian immigrants are powering Poland’s economy
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Ukrainians are powering Poland’s economy
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Plugging the gap
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KALISZ
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POLAND’S most visible labour market begins shortly after dawn. About 30 women and a similar number of men wait in separate groups beside a road half an hour’s drive south of Warsaw. The eager stand at the kerb, craning their necks to search for cars. The more resigned slump in the shade of a tree or pace about, smoking. When a Volvo pulls up they dash towards it, awaiting offers of work. The youngest is 20, the oldest a gap-toothed 53-year-old. All of them are Ukrainian.
The number of ...
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Upping the ante: Poland’s ruling party picks a fight with Germany
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The embattled ruling party picks a fight with Germany
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That’ll cost you
That’ll cost you
POLAND lost a fifth of its population in the second world war. Vast swathes of Warsaw were razed to the ground and the city still bears the scars. Damage to the capital alone amounted to $45bn, according to an estimate in 2004 by city hall. Yet Poland got nothing in compensation. In 1953, under pressure from the Soviet Union, its communist government renounced any claim to reparations from the then East Germany, ruled by a fellow-communist regime. ...
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Poles depart: The beginning of the end of Britain’s biggest episode of migration
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Britain’s biggest-ever episode of immigration has drawn almost to a halt
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Return journey
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THE windows of the Biedronka Polish supermarket in Peterborough are plastered with posters for local events: a Polish “power disco”, a radio festival and a family fun day. On the noticeboard inside hang advertisements for Polish car services, flats for rent and jobs. The city has one of Britain’s fastest-growing populations of European migrants. But next to the poster for “Golden Clinic”, a Polish beauty salon, is a more ominous message. “Being you is not a crime. Targeting you is,” reads ...
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Polishing up: The British Saturday schools funded by Poland’s government
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Why Polish children can often be found in school at the weekend
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Polishing up
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Diasporas
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Vaulting ahead
Vaulting ahead
ON A Saturday morning in a hall in north London, two young children put on a spirited production of a scene from Stanislaw Wyspianski’s “The Wedding”, a tragic satire about national liberation. Fifty or so more, most below the age of ten, watch attentively. It is the first weekend back at school, and the festivities are part of Poland’s national reading day. The performance over, the children stream out into the sunlight, ready for their time off to begin.
For young Poles in Britain, Saturday school is an increasingly common experience. Founded in the late 1940s by refugees, the number ...
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Pole star: Tadeusz Kosciuszko, Poland’s all-American hero
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THIS summer, when the battle over honouring Confederate leaders was at its most fierce, the Polish embassy in Washington had an arresting solution. Echoing a local conservative radio host, it suggested renaming a Virginian highway—celebrating Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy—after Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish general and statesman. He remains a hero on both sides of the Atlantic, though not nearly as well known in America as he could be, and his spotless Enlightenment values still inspire today. Kosciuszko was born in 1746, the son of a Polish-Lithuanian noble. He gobbled up liberal ideas from a young age: in his twenties, he travelled to France and was exposed to writers like Rousseau and Voltaire. But Kosciuszko’s strongest jolt towards radicalism happened far from Poland. After the start of the American Revolution, he rushed to help the colonists. A skilled military engineer, he helped defend Saratoga from British attack, and designed the fortress at West Point. These talents soon won American admiration. Kosciuszko became a close friend of Thomas Jefferson, who described him as a “pure son of liberty”. After success in the New World, Kosciuszko moved to change things back home. He pushed for the emancipation of the Polish peasantry, and protected his country’s ...
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Into the trees: Preserving Bialowieza
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A row over logging in Europe’s last great ancient forest
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Saving the trees
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Where the bison still roam
Where the bison still roam
DAWN in Bialowieza forest, and the bellowing of deer in rut competes with the buzz of chainsaws. The rival rackets sum up an increasingly ill-tempered argument over the Polish half of the ancient woods that straddle the frontier between Poland and Belarus. The row has reverberated beyond the forest’s borders, and indeed beyond Poland’s. It pits competing visions of environmental stewardship and economic development, and of Poland’s path under the ...
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Duda’s defiance: Poland’s president turns on his former boss
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ON PAPER, Poland has both a president and a prime minister. In practice, there is a third source of authority: Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the chairman of the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS), who is widely seen as the country’s real leader. Since coming to power in 2015, PiS has tried to assert greater control over the country’s courts, its public broadcasters and its state-run enterprises. The European Commission accuses it of undermining the rule of law and has threatened it ...
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Politics this week
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The army sidelines Robert Mugabe, Africa’s great dictator
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The army took control of Zimbabwe, insisting that its coup was not a coup. The generals wanted to stop Robert Mugabe, the country’s 93-year-old dictator, from passing power to his shopaholic wife, Grace. The most likely person to end up in charge is Emmerson Mnangagwa, who was sacked as vice-president earlier this month. See article.
João Lourenço, the president of Angola, fired Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of his predecessor and Africa’s richest woman, as chairman of the state oil company. Since succeeding José Eduardo dos Santos in September, Mr Lourenço, who vowed to fight corruption, has also dismissed the governor of the central bank, the head of the state diamond company and the boards of all three state-owned media companies.
An earthquake in Iran killed at least 530 people and injured thousands more. Hassan Rouhani, the president, blamed some of the damage on the ...
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Letters: Letters to the editor
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Don’t constrain social media
Many thoughtful people are upset that Russian trolls took advantage of Facebook and Twitter to disseminate false information, whether as advertising or fake news. Taking this as a starting point, The Economist calls for the regulation, by someone, of social media (“Do social media threaten democracy?”, November 4th). I beg you to change your minds.
Your evidence consists of a lack of compromise in American politics; “politicians who feed off conspiracy and nativism”; bad governments in Poland and Hungary; and a deeper hatred of Rohingyas in Myanmar. Yet we were quite cross with one another back in 2003, before Facebook was invented. Back then we were at war in Iraq and America had recently impeached and tried a president. The ...
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