A New Kind of Authoritarianism

A New Kind of Authoritarianism

By: Erreh Svaia

Caprine Dispersion

There is no "ruler" in our country. Poland is a democracy. Our Prime Minister leads the government; the President is fulfilling his tasks. But there is a little bit left for the party leader.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski

We'll eradicate Twitter. I don't care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic. There is now a scourge that is called Twitter. The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society. They came to me with this case of Twitter ignoring case of smeared housewife. I said, let's solve this.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the despotic Turkish sultan once mentioned that "democracy was a train that he will leave once it arrived to his destiny ", we can be sure he means it, as we witnessed how Erdogan successfully took the once promising country from its parliamentarian democracy into an imperialistic presidency, almost taking a reverse route from the one modern Turkey founder, Ataturk, who used military power to concentrate power in Turkey and pacify it, and later transformed it into a modern, secular, democratic state, in Erdogan´s case, his procedures include trading in a deceiving way promises of "security" in exchange of restrictions in civil liberties, turning a secular state into a slowly growing fundamentalism (with thousands of mosques built on the last years), destroying free media (editor in chief Murat Sabuncu, editor in chief of one of the only remaining independent Turkish newspapers Cumhuriyet was recently detained along with other journalists), blocking internet (Twitter and Facebook were blocked after messages of Erdogan´s corruption ties starting to surface), putting dissidents in jail (like opposing politician Sirri Sureyya Onder, and 50,000 more journalists and activists since 2016), harassing Kurdish people, using terrorism as a psychological weapon (ruling by decree by keeping a constant state of emergency) and using migrants as a battering ram against the European Union, destroying this way the Turkish republican values and the dream of joining the EU, destroying Turkey's future that because it's geopolitical privileged situation was destined to become one of the most powerful countries in the world, once an example of democracy in the middle of authoritarian monarchies and an example of order on the middle of the Arab Spring chaos, in the recent G20 meeting, Erdogan was seen more as an unwanted guest rather than a worthy ally, the conflict between Germany and Turkey is escalating as Turkey try to play a major role within Germany taking advantage of the Turkish population in that country, and using a staged coup last year to clean his government and the army of possible dissidents against his rule, in today's contemporary history we can watch how democracy is raped by a democratically elected official, and how fear can play a major role into people accepting to give up freedom in exchange of supposed security, when in reality that soon to be tyrant is the real threat to security.

Erdogan boundless ambition destroyed the dream of a country integrated with the European Union, and the future dream of a whole North African region melding with the European Union into a more complex and powerful entity, but illiberal tendencies are not only affecting countries outside the European Union, and Russia and Turkey are not the only warnings of what could be happening to western style democracies, the USA, once democracy´s champion is having troubles of their own with Donald Trump and his brand of Banana Republic policies, Trump himself, isolated from EU leaders like Merkel or Macron, tried to find some asylum in Poland a couple of weeks ago, supposedly celebrating with the Polish government “the western values”, or perhaps giving them their support on the authoritarian power grab, within Poland there's a riot going on, as this once promising democracy, the biggest success story in the ex-communist countries after 1989, is slowly being dismantled and divided powers are slowly being fused in order to create an authoritarian power even out of the hands of its prime minister (Beata Sydlo), its president (Andrzej Duda, who announced his negative on signing the controversial bills, but in the end followed his boss orders) or its supreme court, and right in the hands of the defacto leader of the party in power (Law and Justice), Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a former prime minister and dissident who fought along legendary union leader Lech Walesa against the communists totalitarian rule, who now seems to be repeating the story, remember Marx? First as a tragedy, second as a farce, and Kaczynski, fronting a party that looks more like a sect, is now pushing a judicial reform in order to dismantle checks and balances and power division taking advantage of his parliamentary majority, creating a vast army of loyal bureaucrats to gain more power and control...just like in Soviet times, and using the media as its own propaganda organ (by establishing loyalists to front them), just like in Nazi times, eroding the autonomy of the judiciary system and giving the party leader the chance to name or to veto judges, what kind of judicial system is that, operating at the orders of a political party with the excuse of external intervention by the European Union and using nationalism as an excuse for such truancy attempt at complete power, the recent visit of Donald Trump to Warsaw was no mere coincidence, as now both country leaders share their vision of degradation of the rule of law, as once called liberals are the new authoritarians, concentrating the three branches of government into one single person, the leader of a nationalist, xenophobic, ultra conservative party, a coup on democracy, not much different from the Republican party, the National Front or Fidesz in Hungary.

Kaczynski is a different type of an authoritarian, an evolution from those strong men who seized power thru a violent coup (like Fidel Castro), he is more in line with recent illiberal leaders like Hugo Chavez or Recep Tayyip who grabbed power thru democracy, and then once in power started dismantling democracy, what makes Kaczynski even more dangerous is the fact that Poland current political situation is not under the spell of a single man, not in a literal way, as Kaczynski pulls the strings from the shadows, using a kind of political party authoritarian rule, a “perfect dictatorship” as writer Mario Vargas Llosa once described Mexico´s PRI, a political party who just like the Soviet Union´s Communist Party used different candidates to mask a dictatorship, and in the case of the PRI even staged elections with only their candidate, Kaczynski seems to have successfully infected Poland with his conspiracy theories, he has used fear to isolate his country form the rest of the European Union, and now executes a Trump approved coup on democracy right in the heart of the Union, the peril of Article 7 is starting to become a reality and just as Turkey has put distance between the EU and themselves, the time could come for Kaczynski to do the same, and Hungary might just be next…