Committee for the Defence of Democracy (KOD) protest in Gdasnk against Law and Justice’s (PiS) attempt to change constitutional law. Demotix/Michal Fludra. All rights reserved.Apparently, a mysterious infectious disease has spread across Central and Eastern Europe. Countries, which for years after the fall of communism were examples of an accomplished transition to the ‘Western world’, have been sliding, one after another, into inexplicable madness.
For western commentators, this disease, which they see as a so-passé mixture of nationalism, populism and deficits of democracy, seems to have appeared out of the blue, for no visible reason.
For example, Poland, new Europe’s leading economy, got infected in October, when in the recent elections the right-wing conservative and nationalist Law and Justice party gained a majority in the parliament. The new government inaugurated its tenure with a series of outrageous anti-democratic moves, including a frontal attack on the Constitutional Court and on the independence of the media. Defenders of democracy in Poland and abroad protest and express their concern, but without understanding what happened, they may actually do more harm than good.
