The voting day in Ukrainian presidential elections passed rather calmly, and observers have not reported major electoral fraud, stating that basic standards of free elections were safeguarded. Hopefully the same will apply to the second round on April 21, 2019.
Even though the victory of Zuzana Čaputová in the presidential elections in Slovakia is undeniably a positive development for the Central European region, it should not be perceived as a new macro trend.
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.
All three Polish members of the 4Liberty.eu Network – Civil Development Forum (FOR), Liberté! Foundation, and Projekt: Polska – signed an open letter to the President of Poland Andrzej Duda with an appeal “to protect Polish Constitution and the rule of law which it guarantees”.
Azerbaijan, an oil-rich autocracy perched on the Western shores of the Caspian Sea, is determined to teach a lesson to its unruly youth who increasingly break long-standing taboos in pursuit of democratic freedoms. But the policy of sticks alone may no longer work.
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?
