Poland

Individualism, lack of trust in the state structures as well as in any kind of administration or elite and their decisions were the cornerstone to the Polish success, and now they constitute the major obstacle for moving forward.

Ageing of the Polish society means that every year more and more people will reach the retirement age. At the same time, the number of people of working age will be decreasing. In this context, it appears that the pension system reform implemented in 1999 introduced a not very fortunate principle to the Polish pension system.

The debate on the potential reform of the Polish pension system has brought to light many fallacies about capital pillar of the system. Let\'s clear some of them up.

The dramatic upsurge of CHF/PLN exchange rate in mid-January 2015 triggered in Poland a wave of discussion on the situation of people with mortgages in Swiss currency and who should be deemed responsible for such a state of affairs.

Demographic change is not a tsunami. It proceeds gradually but steadily, just as the ocean\'s tide. It can be foreseen if we simply choose to open our eyes and look at facts.

I don\'t think that the youth want revolution. In these unstable times they rather want stability that no longer favours the mainstream populism, not taking responsibility for the future of the state, unkept promises and embarassing U-turns (career-like as well). Stability in which the political class is not moving further away from the reformatory attitude in the state of constant self-contempt.

One thing is certain: Polish politics will change radically after the October elections. At the moment, a conservative and populist government seems likely. The strategy to secure the postulates of leftist and liberal movements can no longer rely on the “lesser evil” argument. It’s high time for new initiatives.

Last winter, the polls of trust for Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski varied between strong 60 to 80%. Almost no one could have predicted that only four months later he will lose the elections to a young, 43 years old, unknown presidential candidate of the radically right Law and Justice party. Komorowski, supported by the Civic Platform, was defeated twice. And this means that we have entered a completely new age of Polish politics.

The spectrum of hate speech is very broad, varying from hatred to extremely abusive forms of prejudice. Oxford English Dictionary defines hate as “an emotion of extreme dislike or aversion; detention, abhorrence, hatred”. And often the qualification of an action as “extreme” is treated as a decisive parameter in defining hate speech.

The presidential project of the fiscal ordinance was supposed to improve this complex situation. The uncertainties in regulations were supposed to be interpreted in favour of the taxpayers. In other words, the responsibility for legal errors (bungles) would lie on the national state and not on physical persons.