Poland’s long march toward democracy is threatened by quick steps away from it - The Washington Post

Poland’s long march toward democracy is threatened by quick steps away from it - The Washington Post

WARSAW — The Polish Parliament’s move on Saturday to subvert judicial independence has opened a searing debate about whether a nation once held up as a paragon of post-communist democracy has slid back into a darker era.

The Senate’s 55-23 vote on the measure, which is widely expected to be signed into law by President Andrzej Duda, capped a 20-month procession by the right-wing ruling Law and Justice party to bring Poland’s independent institutions under its control. The swift offensive has left leaders who toppled communist rule in 1989 to question whether they succeeded in embedding democratic norms in a state that was under Soviet domination for decades. 

Lech Walesa, a former Polish president and leader of Solidarity, the labor union that helped precipitate communism’s fall across Europe, called Saturday for a mass effort to reengage citizens about the importance of the separation of powers.

“Our generation managed, in the most improbable situation, to lead Poland to freedom,” he told a crowd gathered in Gdansk’s Solidarity Square. “You cannot let anyone interrupt this victory, especially you young people.”