Sometimes ?
Winning a election does NOT mean you get to run things
And?
The US is tight with Poland which is the stepping stone for American and other Western coun tries supply line to the Ukraine…..
Shocked by exit polls on Sunday night indicating that opposition forces had won enough seats in Parliament to oust Poland’s nationalist governing party, Polish state television briefly halted its nonstop abuse of government opponents as traitors. One previously vicious anchor even called them “my dears
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With 99 percent of the votes counted by late Monday night and aligning very closely with the outcome forecast by exit polls, Poland is on the cusp of what many see as the most significant change of power since voters rejected communism in the country’s first partly free election in 1989.
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The big question now, however, is not only whether the opposition can form a government but, if it does manage to take power, can it actually wield it in a system where public broadcasting, the constitutional court, the judiciary in general, the central bank, the national prosecutor’s office and other branches of state have been packed with Law and Justice loyalists who, in many cases, cannot be easily dislodged?
“This is the really important question: How to unwind an illiberal democracy?” said Wojciech Przybylski, the head of Res Publica Foundation, a Warsaw research group.
More alarmist voices are warning that the opposition, despite winning an apparent majority in Parliament, might not even get a chance to start unwinding anything.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Law and Justice’s chairman and Poland’s de facto leader for the last eight years, made clear on Sunday evening in response to exit polls that he will not give up without a fight…..
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A more plausible “nightmarish scenario,” he said, is ”constitutional crisis” — a showdown between the newly elected Parliament and Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, an ally of Law and Justice who is responsible for inviting someone to form a new government…..
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But unlike Hungary, a far smaller country whose increasingly autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orban, has had 13 years to capture state structures, Poland, controlled by Mr. Kaczynski for eight years, has retained many features of a functioning democracy, a vibrant free press separate from state media and an economy not dominated by government cronies….