This Is What You Need To Know About Poland In Crisis

“At the current moment Polish society is divided”, Hromadske’s own correspondent Zhanna Bezpiatchuk explains after bringing back her recent investigative dispatch from the country. “You have one part of journalists, experts and the population who say that democracy is threatened and the other part says that it’s more liberal, more European, more freedom orientated,” she says.

For the first time since 1989, one party now holds the absolute majority in the Polish parliament. Since the Law and Justice Party (PiS) gained control in May of last year, weekly demonstrations have been happening in Warsaw, Poland’s capital, organized by those who are “concerned about the state of democracy.” Beziaptchuk explains that Poland used to have a “well established system of checks and balances but these have been changed all together” by the ruling party, and that PiS “did not just reshuffle the state public institutions” but also “the fundamentals of the laws that regulate these institutions.”

Hromadske’s own correspondent went to Warsaw and Sobolev, PiS’s stronghold, to uncover what’s really going on and to find what you really need to know about the Polish constitutional and political crises, that provoked a massive backlash inside the EU.

Zhanna Bezpiatchuk, Hromadske correspondant presented her own report live on Hromadske’s Sunday Show on 24th January 2016 in Kyiv. Bezpiatchuk was interviewed by Ian Bateson and Natalyia Gumenyuk.