The government’s plea is self-serving. While there is no evidence that Law and Justice was in any way involved in the murder of Adamowicz, the murder of one of the party's most vocal critics has created an atmosphere of fear and emergency that it is likely to exploit to accelerate its near-total takeover of independent institutions and do away with what’s left of Poland’s democracy. [...]
Indeed, it is laughably naïve to assume that the purged public prosecution service will conduct a thoroughly honest investigation. Just a few months ago, it leveled absurd criminal tax fraud charges against Adamowicz in a thinly veiled attempt to derail his bid for a sixth term as mayor of Gdańsk, where he was a highly popular — and vocally anti-government — figure. [...]
The somber reality is that two centers of the liberal opposition, independent city mayors and secular civil society, were targeted Sunday. Both Adamowicz and the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity — Poland’s largest annual charity drive organized outside of the Catholic Church — have been subjected to a relentless hate campaign by state-owned media and increasing harassment by Polish authorities. Gdańsk’s city hall was also under near constant monitoring by the government-controlled anti-corruption bureau. [...]
From the Reichstag fire to Turkey’s attempted military coup in 2016, history offers an abundance of cases when a sense of emergency is ruthlessly leveraged by an aspiring authoritarian regime to consolidate power. The mechanism is always the same: fear-induced unity silences the opposition and legitimizes a heavy-handed response by the government.
No comments:
Post a Comment