Radosław Markowski

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Demonstrators protest Poland's upcoming presidential election in Wroclaw on Thursday. (Bartek Sadowski/Bloomberg News)

EuropaUnión Europea,

Polish voters were supposed to choose their country’s president on Sunday. But now that won’t happen.

Late on Thursday, the National Electoral Commission announced that in view of the government’s decision to strip it of the legal authority to print ballot papers, polling places will remain shut. A postal vote also won’t take place because the government’s decision to print mail-in ballots without legislative authorization led one of the small parties in the ruling coalition to balk.

How did Polish voters feel about voting in the run-up to last week’s chaotic events? The findings from our weekly surveys since early April suggest Polish voters overwhelmingly rejected the idea of an election held under pandemic conditions, under the rules proposed by the government.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea,

Political science has a term for what unfolded in Poland over the past 20 months: autogolpe (self-coup) — when a democratically elected government extends its powers in violation of the constitution.

In the Monkey Cage article we wrote immediately after the Law and Justice party (PiS) won the 2015 elections, we worried that the new government would try to change the political system — even though the PiS lacked the two-thirds majority in Parliament necessary to amend the constitution (it won 37.6 percent of votes, which gave it 51 percent of seats in the Sejm, the lower chamber of Parliament).

PiS is taking aim at Poland’s liberal democracy

We had good reasons to think so: Over the years PiS has become increasingly radical in its critique of the liberal-democratic model of government — and increasingly determined to unmake it.…  Seguir leyendo »