Society

Since 1993, the great majority of public institutions have been managed by local governments. The introduction of KLIK (Klebelsberg Institution Maintenance Centre) led to a myriad of changes in the everyday life of every teacher and student. Financial centralization has transformed previously easy everyday tasks into heavily bureaucratic and difficult.

According to the right wing public opinion, George Soros is one of these “money men”, who support left parties and civil organizations with the purpose of subduing the Christian-conservative course. There is heavy animosity towards civil organizations coming from the political right.

Whether we like it or not, getting closer to Budapest means not only drifting away from Berlin and Brussels, but also from Washington. The political position of Poland in the world states its power in Europe. But a strong position in Europe shouldn’t be built in a way that the Law and Justice does it. In such way, you can only lose this position.

Estonia leads the rankings of women percentage in party memberships with 54%. This means that women form the majority of the party memberships, but they are not influential enough to have an effect on parties’ policies, electoral lists formation and at the end also on election outcomes.

Luckily, the world community in Paris was not as unrealistic as the German Federal Government. The climate treaty expressly allows for the equalization and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Now it\'s up to politicians to align national and international ambitions with the realism of social development and actual climate dynamics.

The purely staff-related nature of the reforms and the statements by Law and Justice\'s politicians leave no doubts that the media fight has one objective: undermining the public media’s ability to scrutinise the actions of the government. The attempt to turn the Polish media into a propaganda tool of the government has already been noticed abroad.

Europe has chosen to define itself as an open society. This allows for individual freedom. But it also gives enemies the opportunity to destroy open spaces, guaranteed by the state, intentionally and with the aim of causing maximum harm. However, it is not only terrorists who are putting the European model at risk.

The sequence of events in Poland might sound familiar to many of you. Hungary experienced quite a similar scenario. Clearly, Poland is not an isolated case. Political radicalisation and anti-democratic backtracking might be contagious.

President Andrzej Duda has just signed the act passed recently by both the Polish parliament (o, hail, the parliamentary majority of Law and Justice!) and the Senate (yay! another session held at 3am!) that is to alter the way in which Constitutional Tribunal operates. So now instead of 5 independent judges we\'ll have 15 (thus 13 will be necessary to make a binding decision) judges of somewhat dubious background while all claims will be scrutinized according to the chronological order in which they have been filed. Sounds sound, but is it really?

On November 18 in Budapest, the Free Market Foundation together with the Uninvited Network and the Civic Platform organized a conference on education. Teachers, students, parents, recruiters and education policy experts worked together during the event to identify the issues of the education system and to formulate responses and solutions.