politics

By most standards, Austria’s democratic credentials are sufficient to warrant a position at the top of rankings. Regardless of whether you take Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI), or Freedom House’s landmark report on Freedom in the World, Austria fares well.

The way youth’s votes will break between the opposition’s coalition and the Spring party may significantly affect the electoral programs and election campaigns of the autumn parliamentary election. In the meantime, we\'re still in our bubble.

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.

The policy of fear reigns in the West. Globalization, international terrorism, financial crises, deindustrialization, and increasingly less stable labor market lead to the emergence of social anxiety that fuels right-wing populism.

Today, I have some very bad news. Yes, this is the end of democracy in Poland. Yesterday (2015 parliamentary elections), the votes of Poles began this process, today it is in the middle, and tomorrow (2019 parliamentary elections), it may end with the death of the free Republic of Poland as we know it.

I’m writing this article from the point of view of a Czech libertarian. It’s meant for foreigners, not necessarily libertarians, to get a better grasp of Czech politics than what they can get from their usual sources of information.

When facing illiberal regimes, a stream of victories by populists and a seemingly unstoppable retreat of liberal democracy, should we also simply adept to the new reality and “make our peace”? I would argue that this is the strategy many people have been pursuing in Hungary.

The surge to prominence of extreme right-wing beliefs has become a sign of our times. It only takes a glance at a comparative analysis of election results and how they changed over the last decade in many Western countries.

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.

At the press conference, Slovak Police President Tibor Gašpar admitted that the motive behind Kuciak’s murder was most likely connected to his ongoing investigation. At the time, Kuciak used to encourage journalists to turn to the police any time they felt endangered.