In Poland, we have grown familiar with the ruling political party, Law and Justice (PiS), which is constantly redefining the boundaries that define what’s acceptable under the democratic system.
The regaining of control over the Constitutional Court and the planned total prohibition of abortions led to international protests and led to the formation of two protest groups that were named The Committee for the Defence of Democracy (KOD) and the Black Protest.
Although the first attempt was to draw tens of thousands of protesters out on the streets without obtaining any real concessions, the mass mobilization of women in opposition to the abortion law that was proposed made the government reduce the pace of abortions. The total prohibition on abortions was put off.
This is probably the most significant success for civil protesters in Poland. But, if Poles are forced to protest each time the government takes the controversial step of limiting civil rights, they’ll need to set up camps in their area.
Pro-abortion protests are an uncommon achievement in Poland. Kacper Pempel/Reuters
Over the past couple of weeks, no less than three alarming incidents have revealed the intent of the government to impose a severance on a wide range of opinions.
Attacks on NGOs
It’s not an easy task to become a non-governmental, nonprofit organization located in Eastern Europe.
In the Czech Republic, NGOs are continuously being criticized or even considered ” unnecessary.” In Hungary, Viktor Orban’s regime is a tyrant of NGOs through nonsensical audits of their finances and is referring to them as “foreign agents.”
It is now the case that Poland’s Law and Justice Party is currently following in. Like the former Czech President Vaclav Klaus, Law and Justice Party Chairman Jaroslaw Kaczynski views civil society as unnecessary, a third-party sector that is constantly interfering between the public and the government. Kaczynski is in the position of making NGO work much more complicated.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski is making Poland less liberal by the day. Kacper Pempel/Reuters
The state-run TV and right-wing media have launched a deliberate smear campaign against civil society organizations and accuse them of taking grants from the state and stealing funds from foreign countries to destabilize the authority of the government.
Organizations like those of the Stefan Batory Foundation, which offers funding to a variety of social and civic activities in Poland, and the publisher of the left Krytyka Polityczna, have been accused of being “agents” of billionaire philanthropist George Soros and his Open Society Foundations.
Non-governmental organizations that are opposed to the government aren’t able to do anything about it. If the state funds them, they are solely to spread ” leftist propaganda” with taxpayer money. If they receive funding from outside the country, they are guilty of seeking out outside interests.
It’s not a problem that right-wing NGOs receive outside funding as all defendants publish information on the sources of their budget on their websites. Transparency is more harmful in this situation. Post-truth has risen to Poland.
The government is currently in the process of establishing a National Centre for the Development of Civil Society. It will be responsible for the distribution of money to nonprofit organizations. The traditional function of civil society organizations in a democratic society is, as an observer, barking at antidemocratic policies; PiS has just decided to establish a larger-than-average version of itself.
It’s easy to figure out what organizations the new center will help: priority treatment will be provided for “traditional” families, Catholic values, and patriotic causes.
Although the government is not able to prohibit outside financing, it is able to kill many organizations by cutting off their state-funded funding.