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Poland
Dec 11, 2023 19:19:07 GMT
Post by Admin on Dec 11, 2023 19:19:07 GMT
WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland's parliament held a vote of confidence in Prime Minister Morawiecki of the right-wing ruling Law and Justice party on the 11th, with a majority voting no confidence. The move marks the first change of government in eight years, paving the way for a broad coalition of pro-EU parties led by Tusk, a former prime minister and former European Union president, to take power.
Of the 456 members who voted, 266 voted no confidence in Prime Minister Morawiecki. 190 people supported it.
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Poland
Dec 13, 2023 21:50:55 GMT
Post by Admin on Dec 13, 2023 21:50:55 GMT
Sikorski, who turned 60 earlier this year, grew up in the small city of Bydgoszcz in northern Poland, when the country was under communist rule. He led a student strike committee in 1981 before fleeing to the UK later that year, where he was granted political asylum, after the Polish government declared martial law. He studied politics, philosophy and economics at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he was a member of the Bullingdon Club alongside Boris Johnson and David Cameron. He later worked as a war correspondent in Afghanistan and Angola before returning to Poland as the communist regime collapsed in 1989 and entering politics. He served as Poland’s defence minister, foreign minister and speaker of parliament, before the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS) came to power in 2015. Sikorski is now an MEP with the centre-right European People’s Party grouping and a fierce critic of the current Polish government. One of the main concerns I had heard from soldiers and civilians in eastern Ukraine, I told him, was what would happen if support in Europe and the wider West began to wane. Were they right to be worried? “Well, in Poland, there is bipartisan consensus to stay the course,” he said. “And in the European parliament, support is also solid.” The EU has already authorised more than €12bn to fund military aid to Ukraine and will likely agree an additional €20bn over the next four years, but he acknowledged more needed to be done to ensure the continuing supply of badly needed ammunition to the country. “I’m angry at the politicians who didn’t have the foresight to realise a year ago that this was going to take some years, and therefore we need to quickly write the contracts for the defence companies and pay them to maintain production lines,” Sikorski said. “We’ve lost many, many months over useless dithering.” While the EU has demonstrated remarkable resolve in its response to the war so far, Sikorski lamented in an essay for Foreign Affairs this summer that the bloc was still hamstrung by its inability to agree a common approach to security. As long as that remained the case, he wrote, the EU would remain a “toothless superpower – which is to say, not a superpower at all”. “We have been very lucky in this emergency,” he told me: “a) that Ukraine fought [back], b) that Joe Biden was in the White House, and c) that the United States was not otherwise engaged. If any of these conditions did not apply, we would be in real trouble.” With Donald Trump, the overwhelming Republican front-runner to contest the White House in 2024, tied with Biden in a New York Times/Siena College poll in July, a second Biden term is far from assured. Europe would struggle to make up the shortfall if the US cut back its support. “I’m a former defence minister, I know how long it takes to create a military unit or to procure new equipment,” Sikorski said. “There are decade-long challenges, and we are behind the curve.” I had one more question for him, which I had purposefully saved for last in case it prompted him to abruptly end the call. After a series of explosions destroyed the Nord Stream gas pipelines beneath the Baltic Sea in September 2022, Sikorski, who had long been critical of the project to connect Germany and Russia, posted a cryptic message on Twitter with a photo of the aftermath and the words: “Thank you, USA.” It had prompted feverish speculation about whether he had some insight as to who was responsible, and led a Russian foreign ministry spokesperson to ask whether it amounted to an official statement before he finally deleted the tweet. What exactly had he meant by it? “Well, that was meant as a joke and not everybody got it,” Radek Sikorski said with a wry grin, clearly amused by his understatement. Still, he pointed out the reports that had since become public based on a US intelligence leak earlier this year, which alleged that Washington had been warned about a plot to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines three months before the incident took place. “So perhaps there was something we should be grateful to the United States for after all,” he said, mischievously. “Because the destruction of Nord Stream, as far as I’m concerned, was a very good thing.”
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Poland
Dec 14, 2023 3:41:02 GMT
Post by Admin on Dec 14, 2023 3:41:02 GMT
Far-right lawmaker uses fire extinguisher to put out Hanukkah Menorah
A far-right Polish lawmaker used a fire extinguisher to put out Hanukkah candles in the country's parliament during an event with members of the Jewish community, provoking outrage and leading the speaker to exclude him from the chamber.
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