Tag Poland

What if they were perfect liberals in 1996?

Seán Hanley of University College London and James Dawson of King’s College and Queen Mary University, London, published a long piece on Poland in Hungary in Foreign Policy (reprinted in the Chicago Tribune) earlier this month – an interesting article,…

Anna Bikont on PiS v. Jan Gross

Anna Bikont had an article in Tablet in mid-March about the new Polish government’s attack on the historian Jan Gross. Poland held a presidential election in May 2015. At a televised debate, the most important of the campaign, the pro-Kaczynski…

Putinist rhetoric in Poland

The Lavrov argument – “Who are you to f—ing lecture me?” – makes a certain sense when the lecturer is currently acting in ways similar to the auditor. Otherwise, it seldom works. Being lectured by David Miliband must be torture – but hey, so what? “Your…

S&P’s downgrade of Polish debt: sounds familiar

For those willing to read beyond the first paragraph, S&P provided a detailed list of Poland’s fiscal risks in their downgrade note (linked by Puls Biznesu). The nationalists’ fiscal preferences have already begun to show, according to Moody’s: Moody’s has warned that Poland’s incoming bank tax threatens…

S&P’s downgrade of Poland was well-founded

There has been much wailing from certain quarters that S&P’s January 15 downgrade of Polish foreign-currency debt from A- to BBB+ was motivated by “politics” and had nothing to do with Poland’s economy. This argument does not make sense, and…

The Kremlin’s Polish frenemies

When I got back to Moscow after the winter vacation earlier this January, one of the first things I had heard (on the boring but, at least, non-government-owned FM station that pretends to focus on “business” but mostly babbles amateurishly about financial…