Blazej Lenkowski

“How Do Democracies Win?” was the main theme of this year\'s edition of Freedom Games, an annual prestigious forum of ideas organized in Lodz, Poland. Needless to say, the title of the forum is a question uneasy to answer. I would also not dare to provide a straight-forward answer to it.

What we need is a President of the European Union elected democratically by all European citizens by means of a general election. There is nothing more engaging than actively electing the head of a common Europe.

Time and again, those who should defend “our” ideas vehemently beat their breast and start apologizing, claiming that they were stupid in their attempts to redefine liberalism. They sometimes even go as far as to state that liberalism is a thing of the past.

It is worth to evaluate the Robert Biedron\'s Spring party in a more objective manner, in an attempt to understand its potential consequences for a broader political context in Poland. Is it feasible that the new party would contribute to implementing a more liberal platform in the country?

I\'m truly rooting for the bill on separating the church from the state, which was announced by Polish Initiative headed by Barbara Nowacka on Epiphany. Of course, let\'s not kid ourselves that such an initiative has any chance of succeeding in the current Polish Parliament.

Our progress is already big – for example, you can work almost anywhere in Europe. But we have reached the wall – because we don\'t know what foundation, what system we should have. When we do not have solutions, demons wake up.

In 2015, Polish reporter Tomasz Grzywaczewski embarked on a journey to the ghost republics that span from Donbas to Abkhazia, to South Ossetia, and to mountainous Karabakh. What he saw in the shadows of ongoing conflicts is that there is still life and people who dream of peace.

Law and Justice seems to be going for neither the Anglo-Saxon, nor the Scandinavian solutions, nor any other type known from the Western market economies, but it instead, step by step, brings Poland back to the socialist system, enabling at the same time the emergence of a lobbying paradise.

What sets liberals apart from representatives of other ideological options is a strong trust in the capabilities of an individual and the key role of protecting the rights of an individual. Building a liberal community is currently of utmost importance, both in Poland and Europe in general.

It is not true that we face a drastic crisis of liberal movements – it is the alternative to these organizations that has changed radically as a result of a deep structural crisis of the left wing. To put it plainly and oversimplifying a little, the democratic struggle in the Western world takes place between the “liberal” and “non-liberal” camps.