ON JULY 1ST, about 1,000 dark-suited delegates squeezed into a school sports hall in Przysucha, a small town 100km south of Warsaw, for the national congress of the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party. Since coming to power in 2015, the right-wing party and its leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, have packed the constitutional tribunal with their own loyalists, transformed the public broadcaster into a propaganda mouthpiece for the government and clashed with the European Commission over migration policy and the rule of law. The country’s nativist lurch has outraged liberals and divided Polish society. The party congress’s slogan, “Poland is one”, seemed like an Orwellian attempt to deny the split, or perhaps to rub it in.
Mr Kaczynski, who turned 68 last month, was in high spirits. From the podium he enumerated PiS’s successes, such as reducing child poverty and improving tax collection. He listed the taming of the media and the judiciary as victories, too. When he cracked...Continue reading
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