Magdalena Melnyk

This year will undoubtedly be crucial for the future of democracy. As Professor Timothy D. Snyder, specializing in this area, says, it could be a year of either a breakdown and further prolonged recession of democracy worldwide or a breakthrough and the defense of these democracies. They will manage to confront the growing populism, disinformation, and tremendous pressure from authoritarian systems.

Let us not divide the world into either black or white, male or female. Polish parliament is not made up only out of men, the law instating ban on abortion is not only about gagging women. It is first and foremost aimed at limiting the rights of the entire civic society, it concerns and affects not only women but all of us.

When Barack Obama landed at the airport in Havana, he not only did symbolicly end the period of cold war between the two countries, but has also very clearly shown what are the main objectives of his foreign policy. The presidential visit is the high point of the ongoing for a year US-Cuba relations which have been reinstated in December 2014.

There are two processes going on in the Polish reality, which at a first glance may seem to exclude one another. On the one hand, there is a mass decrease in the number of church-going believers (circa 2-4 millions in the last few years), and on the other, there is the phenomenon of overtaking the “moral” discourse in Poland by extreme groups related to Church.