Poland is holding an election Sunday that many view as its most important one since the 1989 vote that toppled communism. At stake are the health of the nation’s democracy, its legal stance on LGBTQ+ rights and abortion, and the foreign alliances of a country on NATO’s eastern flank that has been a crucial ally to Ukraine.
Political experts say the election will not be fully fair after eight years of governing by a conservative nationalist party that has eroded checks and balances to gain more control over state institutions, including the courts, public media and the electoral process itself.
Opponents of the ruling Law and Justice party fear it could be their last chance to preserve the constitutional system won at great cost through the struggle of many Poles, from former President Lech Walesa to the millions who supported his Solidarity movement.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Political experts say the election will not be fully fair after eight years of governing by a conservative nationalist party that has eroded checks and balances to gain more control over state institutions, including the courts, public media and the electoral process itself.
Opponents of the ruling Law and Justice party fear it could be their last chance to preserve the constitutional system won at great cost through the struggle of many Poles, from former President Lech Walesa to the millions who supported his Solidarity movement.
The election “will decide the future of Poland as a country of liberal democracy, a system that has been a guarantor of Polish success for the last three decades,” the editor of the Rzeczpospolita newspaper, Boguslaw Chrabota, wrote in a Friday editorial.
“I’m afraid that I’ll wake up after the elections and there will be such a change that, for example, abortion will be promoted (and) LGBT,” said civil servant Bozena Zych, 57, after leaving a Catholic church located in a hipster area of Warsaw filled with gay-friendly establishments.
Some interviewed in recent days by The Associated Press became very emotional or fought back tears as they described what they regard as corruption, democratic backsliding, propaganda and bitter divisions in Polish society since Law and Justice came to power in 2015.
Wojciech Przybylski, editor-in-chief of Visegrad Insight, a policy journal focused on Central Europe, said the practice threatens the ability of the middle class to advance socially “without special connections to politics.”
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