Kaczynski’s hardliners are remaking the state along right-wing nationalist lines

"We are turning Warsaw into Budapest", announced the head of "Law and Justice" (PiS), Jaroslaw Kaczynski, after the lost parliamentary election in 2011 already announced. After winning the parliamentary election on 25. October and the swearing-in of the new government under Prime Minister Beata Szydlo on 16. November, he can make his dream of a national-conservative reshaping of Poland along the lines of Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban come true.

It is not Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, the former election chief of the successful PiS presidential candidate Andrzej Duda, who is the crucial figure. Significantly, Szydlo took a vacation in early November, when important talks on forming a government were underway,

Photo: Wassilis Aswestopoulos

One cause, many conflicts and crude political explosives

Athens will experience another state of emergency this weekend. For Sunday a rude demonstration is announced in Athens from 14 o’clock. It is ostensibly about the name dispute with the neighboring republic to the north, whose official name, which has prevailed for twenty-six years, is "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" (FYROM) reads. With more than 1.500 buses, special planes and with tickets for driving sponsored by the shipping company ANEK, numerous Greeks will come to Athens to protest.

ETA ended its ceasefire yesterday with a crude attack on the Madrid airport

What was feared by many has turned into reality faster than expected. With more than half a ton of explosives, the Basque underground organization ETA announced the end of the ceasefire it had been observing since March. It has thus dealt another heavy blow to the languishing peace process, which the Spanish government has now "suspended" was. Early Saturday, the bomb completely destroyed the parking garage at Terminal 4 of Madrid’s Barajas Airport. Three warning calls were received an hour before the attack, yet police apparently failed to clear the parking garage. Two people are missing, 24 were slightly injured.

Meanwhile, the regional government of the province of Madrid has declared that the Renault Traffic minibus parked in the parking garage was loaded with 500-800 kilograms of explosives. This is the only way to explain why the bomb brought down the entire parking garage. There are no further details about the explosives.