Skip to main content

A Ray of Hope

As the results continue to come in from the Polish elections, two things are already clear:

Firstly that turnout has risen sharply, to 55%- which is the highest since 1989;

Secondly that the country has decisively rejected the ultra-nationalist Samo obrona- Self Defence and the ultra-Conservative Lega Polskich Rodzin- the League of Polish Families. Even more crucially, despite the benefit that the ruling PiS- Law and Justice- have gained from the demise of their erstwhile allies, it is the Liberal opposition, Platforma Obwytelska that has stormed to victory.

The Liberals were supported by the young generation of Poles, who found the backward looking pugnaciousness of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski extremely difficult to take.

The fact that the outgoing Prime Minister is the twin of the surviving President, Lech Kaczynski, will undoubtedly make life difficult for the incoming Prime Minister, Donald Tusk. However the scale of the victory of Civic Platform is so large that Mr. Tusk can claim a real moral mandate.

Although the proto-Putinism of the Kaczynskis has now been completely rejected by the Polish electorate, particularly the younger generation. The atmosphere in the country was likened to 1989 by one well placed friend of mine:

"It is", he said, "a ray of hope".

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Only a few of us in the LibDems view them as liberal though.

They don't have a 'social justice' agenda apparently. That means they can't be liberal.

The only thing I really disagree with from the policies I've seen is they want FPTP.

Yours,

Gordon Trenchard
3:37 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop...
Post a Comment
Read more

One Year On

  Head vabariigi iseseisvuspäeva! Happy Estonian Independence Day! It is one year since I stood outside the Estonian Parliament for the traditional raising of the national flag from Tall Hermann tower. Looking at the young fraternities gathered with their flags, I was very sure that Estonia too would soon be facing the aggression of the criminal Russian regime. A tragic and dark day. 5 eyes intelligence had been clear: an all out invasion was going to happen, and Putin´s goals included- and still include- "restoration" of Russian imperial power across Europe, even to the Atlantic. Yet there was one Western intelligence failure: we all underestimated the guts of the Ukrainian armed forces, the ZSU, and its President and people. One year on, Estonia, and indeed all the front line states against Russia, knows that Ukraine saved us. Estonia used that time to prepare itself, should that "delayed" onslaught ever be unleashed, but equally the determination of Kaja Kallas, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more