We talk with Katarzyna Szymielewicz, president of the Polish NGO Panoptykon Foundation. How has the situation for digital rights changed since Donald Tusk took over the country’s government? What’s happening at the country’s Eastern border? What's the state of the investigation into Pegasus? And are we all sitting in a sinking ship?
I mean, progress is slow and they don’t have the president. Of course things will not be ideal over night.
But they stopped sliding into authoritarianism, at least for now. That is something that has changed.
This copium unfortunately.
KO & co continue slide towards authoritarianism but there is way less scrutiny because corpo media favour liberals. Public media takeover was outright illegal but they didn’t want to wait, just like PiS. Transparency is eroding again, public information requests are still ignored. We’re now in an endless stream of corruption news from WP and some other independent media. All of this is sprinkled with things like legalising shooting at the border, suspension of asylum requests (which were suspended for years anyway) and other fun stuff. Healthcare is being slowly dismantled - orthopaedic / rehabilitation centres are at risk of closing down and we’re shutting down maternity wards all around the country. Austerity will only lead to even more far right tendencies in the society and they know that. Oh, and they just severely limited medical weed availability today. Having the presidential seat won’t change shit if things can’t get passed even through lower chamber of the parliament.