Poland

The Hungarian-Polish veto on the EU budget and the recovery fund was averted at the European Council last week, but threats to core European values were not. The EU’s rule of law crisis is nowhere near to being solved, and attacks on fundamental rights and democracy will intensify in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Our local Heads of Office are turning their attention to Belarus: Joanna Maria Stolarek discovers the spirit of Polish Solidarność on the streets of Belarus. Sergej Sumlenny reports on unexpectedly cautious, neutral and ambivalent responses from Ukraine. And in Moscow, President Aljaksandr Lukashenka remains the partner of choice, Johannes Voswinkel writes.

Despite its tough public rhetoric, the Polish government might turn out to be more flexible behind closed doors regarding the New Pact, to prevent embarrassing defeats on issues that are far more important from a domestic policy point of view, such as the rule of law.

Following a suspense-packed election thriller, Poland has elected its new president. What seemed like it would be a walkover for the incumbent, Andrzej Duda, turned out to be an attempt to shift the direction of Polish domestic affairs.

The direction has been pointing constantly downwards since 2015. In the international ranking on press freedom by "Reporters Without Borders", Poland was 18th at the time, but has now slipped to 62nd place. 44 places in five years. The changes in the media landscape are admittedly occurring more subtly than in Hungary, for example. But restrictions on the work of journalists in the country are becoming increasingly noticeable.

The crisis associated with the Covid19 pandemic has a gender, and clearly shows social inequalities of all kinds. It particularly affects women, as well as disadvantaged and variously marginalised groups. There are also attempts to exploit the pandemic for short-term political goals directly targeting women's rights.

Across Europe and beyond, actors on the nationalist right are instrumentalising the concept of gender for their own political gains. In Poland the incumbent right-wing Law and Justice party, backed by the Catholic Church, demonised LGBT organisations in its recent successful electoral campaign.