Despite another win for Law and Justice, the three voting blocks of the democratic opposition are most likely to form a coalition government led by Donald Tusk.

As the Polish electoral campaign enters its most crucial phase, it is already clear there will be a hard fought battle for third place. While dashing any hopes of a unified opposition list against PiS, two party leaders have put their political survival on the line in order to break the Kaczyński-Tusk duopoly. The consequences of this move might not be what they intended.

Authorities claim landslide victory for President Lukashenka in an election that was neither free nor fair.

The president supported by Law and Justice comes on top with a narrow win in Poland’s election thriller.

After a highly contested first round, candidates Andrzej Duda and Rafał Trzaskowski will go head-to-head on July 12th for the presidency.

Interview with Sam Sokol, author of Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews: Antisemitism, Propaganda, and the Displacement of Ukrainian Jewry. Interviewer: Daniel Gleichgewicht.

A review of Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews: Antisemitism, Propaganda, and the Displacement of Ukrainian Jewry. By: Sam Sokol. Publisher: ISGAP, New York. 2019

An interview with Ilia Darchiashvili, the Ambassador of the Republic of Georgia to Poland. Interviewer Daniel Gleichgewicht

Interview with Miriam Synger, director of the Emuna Foundation, which supports the Jewish community in Łódź. Interviewer: Daniel Gleichgewicht.

An interview with Shana Penn, executive director of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture. Interviewer: Daniel Gleichgewicht

DANIEL GLEICHGEWICHT: You have worked in support of Jewish cultural revitalisation in Poland for many years now. How would you describe the way Jewish life in Poland has changed over this time?

The end of state socialism in 1989 made it possible to reimagine Poland as a place where Jews might live openly, in relative freedom and security. The options were manifold, drawing from the cultural vibrancy that once made Poland the centre of the Jewish world, to one’s exposure to Jewish life in the US, Israel or other parts of Europe, to the extension of one’s own Jewish upbringing in Poland.

An interview with Balázs Jarábik, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Interviewers: Iwona Reichardt and Daniel Gleichgewicht of New Eastern Europe

NEW EASTERN EUROPE: You recently attended the high-level Minsk Dialogue Forum. Among the speakers was Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka. How do you interpret his participation in this event that gathers international experts and representatives of the third sector? What kind of message did he intend to send to the wider world?

BALÁZS JARÁBIK: The most important thing was the fact that he attended a civil society conference. As far as I am aware, this was his first such occurrence. It certainly illustrated how the attitude of the regime is slowly changing vis-à-vis civil society in Belarus. Currently there are several interesting areas internally where co-operation is moving and where the government is beginning to understand the value of civil society.