After eight years of populist chaos, Donald Tusk must rebuild trust in the state and resist the urge to simply turn the tables, says Guardian columnist Timothy Garton Ash
Two former ministers of the previously ruling Law and Justice (PiS) government, convicted of the falsification of documents while in public office, take refuge in the palace of the president, their party comrade Andrzej Duda.
Its new-style news programmes are incomparably more impartial (I’ve been watching them), but even a legal scholar highly critical of PiS characterises the steps taken to achieve this good result as “revolutionary moves”.
The name-calling gets ever louder, but the new coalition government headed by Donald Tusk, a former prime minister (from 2007 to 2014) and president of the European Council (from 2014 to 2019), continues to purge PiS’s strongholds of embedded state power with what this formidable politician has called “an iron broom”.
Most obviously, there’s the difficulty of restoring the institutions of a liberal democracy, built from scratch on the ruins of a Soviet-type system after 1989 and then subject to systematic demolition after 2015, when PiS came to power, but with the country remaining a member of the European Union.
A stable liberal democracy depends on a basic social consensus around the legitimacy of key institutions such as parliament, presidency, independent courts and free media.
Instead of playing the vital role of a neutral head of state during a difficult political transition, he has become even more partisan, offering convicted criminals refuge in the presidential palace and bleating fatuous hyperbole.
The original article contains 1,115 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Two former ministers of the previously ruling Law and Justice (PiS) government, convicted of the falsification of documents while in public office, take refuge in the palace of the president, their party comrade Andrzej Duda.
Its new-style news programmes are incomparably more impartial (I’ve been watching them), but even a legal scholar highly critical of PiS characterises the steps taken to achieve this good result as “revolutionary moves”.
The name-calling gets ever louder, but the new coalition government headed by Donald Tusk, a former prime minister (from 2007 to 2014) and president of the European Council (from 2014 to 2019), continues to purge PiS’s strongholds of embedded state power with what this formidable politician has called “an iron broom”.
Most obviously, there’s the difficulty of restoring the institutions of a liberal democracy, built from scratch on the ruins of a Soviet-type system after 1989 and then subject to systematic demolition after 2015, when PiS came to power, but with the country remaining a member of the European Union.
A stable liberal democracy depends on a basic social consensus around the legitimacy of key institutions such as parliament, presidency, independent courts and free media.
Instead of playing the vital role of a neutral head of state during a difficult political transition, he has become even more partisan, offering convicted criminals refuge in the presidential palace and bleating fatuous hyperbole.
The original article contains 1,115 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!