{"id":1312,"date":"2006-07-26T12:01:00","date_gmt":"2006-07-26T12:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2006\/07\/26\/is-poland-going-potty\/"},"modified":"2008-02-14T09:43:37","modified_gmt":"2008-02-14T09:43:37","slug":"is-poland-going-potty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2006\/07\/is-poland-going-potty\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Poland going potty?"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK, so they’ve got a set of identical twins running the country – unusual, but not necessarily mad – yet they do seem to be ushering in some potentially worrying electoral changes<\/a> and acting somewhat vindictively towards political opponents<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now Poland – the largest and likely most important of the new EU member states who joined two years ago – appears to be shifting away from Brussels. This despite the Prime Ministerial Kaczynski twin’s vaguely pro-EU tone on his coming to office<\/a> a few days ago. Now, however, the twins have launched a purge of pro-EU officials<\/a>, apparently being pitched as an attempt to clamp down on communists<\/a>. (And no, my anti-EU friends, this is not an excuse for you to churn out the usual tedious “EUSSR” rubbish and claims that the EU is a communist plot in the comments.)<\/p>\n

Is this part of the rightwards shift<\/a> (NYT reg req.) in the country, as seen in the rise of the skinheads in anti-Gay riots and racially-motivated attacks both in Poland and in Germany during the World Cup? Is there something even more sinister at work in this country with a history of, shall we say, “strong leaders”? Or is it merely a childishly petulant toys out of pram moment prompted by those potato jibes<\/a> from Germany?<\/p>\n

Of course the question is, if this right-wing sibling pair move away from Brussels and simultanously start persecuting former communists, where are they going to look for allies? I can hardly imagine Russia’s ex-KGB President being too pleased at teaming up with a country trying to remove his former secret police colleagues from positions of influence.<\/p>\n

But then again, I’ll freely admit to knowing next to nothing about Poland. Some blogs that may help include that of the Economist’s Edward Lucas<\/a>, p3<\/a>, The Beatroot<\/a> (currently on holiday), Our Man in Gdansk<\/a>, and Polish Police and Administrative Corruption<\/a>. Any others you know of, let me know. Something odd’s certainly happening over there, and it will have serious implications for the rest of the EU if Poland goes mental…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK, so they’ve got a set of identical twins running the country – unusual, but not necessarily mad – yet they do seem to be ushering in some potentially worrying electoral changes and acting somewhat vindictively towards political opponents. Now … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[187],"class_list":["post-1312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poland","tag-poland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}