Bagpipes and techno blast at Warsaw pro-choice march, but menace lurks (The Observer)
It was a surreal sight – and a terrible sound. On Friday evening, as tens of thousands of pro-choice protesters gathered in Warsaw for a massive demonstration against a near-total ban on abortion, military police in red berets formed a…
Pro-choice supporters hold biggest-ever protest against Polish government (The Guardian)
About one hundred thousand protesters took to the streets of the Polish capital, Warsaw, on Friday, in the largest demonstration of popular anger directed against Poland’s ruling rightwing Law and Justice party (PiS) since it assumed office in 2015. Protests…
Polish pro-choice protests continue with blockades and red paint (The Guardian)
Thousands of protesters turned out in towns and cities across Poland on Monday as a political crisis sparked by an impending near total ban on abortion showed no sign of abating. Drivers created a series of blockades in city centres…
The Polish IPO with a high price tag and even higher hopes (Financial Times)
When the IPO of Allegro, Poland’s biggest ecommerce company, was announced earlier this month it had a lofty valuation attached and some equally lofty hopes — that it would boost the country’s fortunes as a financial centre and help end…
Law and Justice loses touch with Poland’s moderate Catholics (Financial Times)
Polish president Andrzej Duda visited Pope Francis in the Vatican on Friday, in a meeting between two men seen by many in Poland as embodying very different visions for the future of the Catholic Church. Mr Duda, a conservative regarded by…
Podcast: Poland divided as right-wing populists win again (The Guardian)
The re-election of Andrzej Duda as Poland’s president this week was by the narrowest of margins and has sent liberals in the country into a tailspin. Duda’s campaign pivoted away from pro-welfare messaging to one dominated by “family values” and…
Infiltrating a ‘troll farm’: Chips with Everything podcast (The Guardian)
Katarzyna Pruszkiewicz spent six months working in a PR firm in Poland, where she was told to promote controversial content that would influence people through a fake, rightwing Twitter account. I joined presenter Jordan Erica Webber to discuss the story…
The battle for the rule of law in Poland will have consequences across Europe (Prospect)
EU institutions have been criticised by eurosceptics across the continent for “meddling” in the internal affairs of member states accused of wrongdoing. But this betrays a basic misunderstanding of what is at stake. All national courts are also European courts, and…
The murder of Gdansk mayor Paweł Adamowicz reflects Poland’s increasingly toxic political climate (New Statesman)
Already at the time of writing, just one day after Adamowicz’s death, there are distressing signs that this question is once again dividing Poland against itself. The government and its supporters stand accused of feeding and normalising hate speech, the…
Don’t judge Poland by what has happened here since 2015 (The Guardian)
On 11 November, as much of Europe marks the centenary of the armistice that brought the first world war to an end, Poland will celebrate 100 years since the re-establishment of an independent Polish state after more than a century…
Christian Davies 