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Ellen Hinsey

A State of Fog: Making Sense of the Polish (Non)Election

June 16, 2020

Ellen Hinsey reports on recent developments in Poland during lockdown, where the May 10 presidential election was not officially canceled, nor was it held.

OVER THE LAST TEN YEARS we have seen the progressive rise of authoritarianism in Europe and now also in the United States. Restrictions on the media, limits on freedom of assembly, and the dismantling of the separation of powers have taken different forms in different countries. In Central Europe, over the last two months, countries have used COVID-19 lockdown conditions to pass emergency laws or introduce further repressive measures. In Poland, the governing Law and Justice party attempted to push through legislation that would have resulted in a presidential election that was neither free nor fair. The story suggests a cautionary tale for us all.

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In Europe, the uncertainty brought about by the pandemic comes on the heels of a twelve-year period in which—after the 2008 financial crisis, the 2015 refugee crisis, and the recent rise of anti-democratic sentiment—social and political assurances have steadily been eroded. We are aware that we are facing not only a pandemic of exceptional proportions, but that something even more disruptive, even more dangerous, may await us. We are confronted with the most pressing questions: do we have the resources to maintain our civic decency, address our errors, in short, to save ourselves?

Among the critical tools we possess to counter this moment of pandemic uncertainty—in addition to farsighted medical recommendations and scrupulous crisis management—is that of legal certainty. The last two months in Poland, as the ruling Law and Justice party prepared for a presidential election, have shown us how the basis of a country’s rule of law and legal certainty—as it pertains to the fundamental democratic freedom of free and fair elections—can be dismantled.

Poland’s State of Fog
A review of the facts: like many nations, in the face of the gravity of the COVID-19 epidemic, the Polish government sought to introduce emergency regulations to address the crisis. The Polish Constitution allows for a response to such an emergency situation under its “extraordinary measures,” including a “State of Natural Disaster,” fundamentally suited for the COVID-19 epidemic. However, anxious to carry through with the country’s May presidential elections, the Law and Justice government held off, as enacting this extraordinary measure would have legally triggered the postponement of all elections until the crisis’s end. Moreover, with the incumbent Law and Justice President Andrzej Duda leading in the polls—national confinement having provided him with unequaled campaign visibility—such a step was not deemed advantageous. Instead, on March 13 the Polish Government introduced by decree a “State of Epidemic Emergency” (later changed to “State of Epidemic”). Legal scholars sharply questioned the proportionality of the restrictions introduced under the State of Epidemic (not among the constitution’s extraordinary measures), as well as its indefinite duration, but we leave that debate for another time.

Two weeks later, in early April, a sequence of events began to unfold that would gravely undermine Poland’s legal certainty regarding free and fair elections. Although voices, including the Polish Association of Epidemiologists and four hundred legal experts, increasingly called for the election’s postponement—and despite the fact that the country’s Constitutional Tribunal holds that no electoral law should be modified less than six months prior to an election—on April 6 Law and Justice introduced a special election draft act and pushed it though the Sejm in a single day. Defying growing opposition, the draft act proposed, with now only a month remaining before the presidential election, to organize national postal voting for 30 million citizens, a task never before attempted in Poland. It also included a highly disputed restructuring of the electoral process itself, in particular by transferring the organization of the elections from the country’s independent National Election Commission to the Ministry of State Assets, run by Jacek Sasin, a Law and Justice appointee.

Due to the controversial nature of the proposed changes under pandemic conditions, critics of the legislation contended that if the elections were to go forward, they would effectively be conducted without a genuine competitive campaign, with inadequate assurances for the ballots’ delivery and inviolability, and without requisite provisions for overseas voting. These doubts, and numerous others, were expressed not only by the country’s political opposition, but also by certain key politicians aligned with the leading party, and disagreement over the bill subsequently created a split between the majority Law and Justice party and its coalition partner Agreement, led by Jarosław Gowin, who resigned in protest.

Future legal scholars may well single out May 6, 2020, as a particularly dark day for Poland’s constitutional history. On that day, with chaotic and incomplete postal voting preparations, and only four days to go, party leaders Jarosław Kaczyński and Jarosław Gowin, newly reconciled, issued a joint statement announcing that the presidential election—though constitutionally required to be held on May 10—would not be officially canceled, but neither would it be held (stay with me here), with the understanding that the Polish Supreme Court, which oversees the legitimacy of elections, would consider such a (nonexistent) election invalid, and having invalidated it, empower the Marshall of the Sejm to set a new date.

Here it seems, having left behind legal certainty, one reaches the abyss of the legally absurd.

To further complicate matters, even if it wished to do so, the Polish Supreme Court is only empowered to issue such a verdict on the basis of an election report by the National Election Commission. On election night, the National Election Commission would announce that since there had been no election, there had been no candidates, and no such report would be forthcoming.

Thus, on Sunday, May 10, 2020, the Polish nation awoke mystified, to no ballots, no election, and to candidates who had vanished. In short, fog and uncertainty reigned.

Subsequently (based on the National Election Commission’s legal fiction of nonexistent candidates, a contested fact) it was announced that the Marshall of the Sejm, as if ex nihilo, would set a new election date. After two months of contentious struggle, the opposition parties accepted this proposal.

At this writing, it appears that the Poles will have hybrid postal and in-person elections at the end of June. With the cost, however, of a clear disregard for fundamental principles of rule of law.

Life after COVID-19: Dancing on the Precipice
What can we learn from this cautionary tale? As we remember, a number of other high-stakes presidential elections are approaching—notably in the United States—where human safety and democratic legal certainty are being weighed in the balance of political ambition. The implications of basing one’s reelection on the compromised safety and lives of those one is mandated to serve deserves no comment. In this time of global upheaval, however, what we can know is that either we fight to uphold the integrity of our legal systems—with the hope they will be there for us after the COVID-19 crisis—or we can squander them now. To make such a dangerous trade-off now with our rule of law and legal certainty, to be sure, is at our greatest peril.


This special dispatch is a follow-up to Hinsey’s earlier pieces on Poland, which are available here.

Ellen Hinsey is NER‘s international correspondent. She has lived in Paris since 1987, and witnessed firsthand the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. She has extensively reported on the rise of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Irish Times, Die Welt and Poetry. Her most recent books are Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism and The Illegal Age, a poetic investigation into the twentieth-century’s legacy of totalitarianism and the rise of political illegality.

Filed Under: Editors' Notebooks, NER Digital, News & Notes Tagged With: Ellen Hinsey, Polish Constitutional Crisis

J. M. Tyree

Remote Viewing

April 13, 2020

Our nonfiction editor reflects on the movies as a binding force for good, and NER offers a sold-out issue for free, including our first film supplement.

On lockdown in the nation’s capital with my novelist wife and our anxiety-ridden tortoiseshell cat, I keep getting e-mails with suggestions for films I ought to watch “while you are bored at home” during the pandemic. Sharing movie ideas with far-flung friends and with my wonderful film students brings me a sense of solace and normalcy when the whole world is going haywire. So here goes my version of “while you are trapped at home and bored/terrified/losing your gourd/wiping down high-touch surfaces/feeling desolated and crazed/trying to stay positive/succumbing to despair/donating to hospital charities/knitting a masterpiece scarf that doubles as a face covering.” I really don’t mean to sound flip—I’m barely holding it together much of the time (refresh, refresh, refresh). And we are the lucky ones privileged enough to stay at home.

This blog post contains my viewing journal for a plague season. I make no apology for my decision to recommend whatever strikes my fancy, whether or not it seems “relevant,” “appropriate,” “relatable,” or any of those other soul-killing terms. Given NER‘s literary mission, it makes some sense to foreground adaptations from the page to the screen. But I am not feeling sensible, so I will not be following that plan. I’ve named this post “Remote Viewing” for obvious reasons, given the circumstances of a world without open cinemas and popcorn machines. That’s one very small and insignificant aspect of this heartbreak and these are my love letters to films that I miss sharing. I enjoy being with other people when they watch a great film for the first time. I like listening to how it affects them to experience art in the same room—and then hearing them fight about it afterwards.

The series to watch right now, if you can bear it, is HBO’s devastating account of nuclear error, Chernobyl. And, if you cannot bear it, then watch the hilarious HBO space farce Avenue 5. Actually both shows are about the same thing, which is precarious oddballs risking their lives to save people who are threatened with imminent death due to the rank incompetence and lies of their leaders during a disaster. In fact, that’s what every film is about now, it seems, from A to Z—from Ridley Scott’s blockbuster Alien (1979, don’t break quarantine, you fools!) to Lucrecia Martel’s latest masterpiece, Zama (2017), which among other things memorably features an outbreak of disease in eighteenth-century colonial Argentina.

I, too, have noticed lately that few characters in cinema, from the denizens of the ship in McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (1957) and the blue people of Cameron’s Avatar (2009) to the serial killer in Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) and the psychedelic desert orgy-goers in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) are practicing responsible social distancing. I suppose the accidental exceptions are Tom Hanks in Cast Away (2000) and Tom Hardy in Locke (2013), two films that achieve additional poignancy at the moment, for different reasons. As does J. C. Chandor’s sea-disaster one-man show, All Is Lost (2013), if you can stand a film with that title at the moment. And then there’s the unforgettable isolation of Cuaron’s Gravity (2013).

These movies where mostly solitary figures take up almost all the space and screen time are somewhat rare, although Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1964) fits the bill and the meal-prep scenes of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975) perhaps feel closer to resembling the way we live now. And besides, if you are fortunate enough to have the time, this era of self-isolation might well provide a unique opportunity to take in the full power of such films and to see them in a new light, as riveting dramas as driven and compelling in their extraordinary internal poetic logic as the chase scenes in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). The big sister, Elsa, in Frozen (2013) also had the right idea—if anyone needs me I’ll be chilling in my ice castle.

Okay, now that I have established myself as a serious critic with a clearly defined set of tastes—sorry/not sorry, I love it all—I’m going to be so bold as to suggest that you watch nothing except what makes you feel most deliciously alive. For me that’s always going to start with Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), with its travels to the four corners of the globe. Marker’s narrator files quasi-fictional reports in the form of letters from the richest areas of Tokyo to the poorest markets of the Cape Verde islands. 

It’s a strange sort of film that seems to be a different movie each time I view it. It’s also a film of films, containing many other movies inside it, and a film about film and about television that “watches you back.” One of the most intriguing sequences records Marker retracing all of the real-life locations of another film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), which Marker claimed to have seen nineteen times. Watching Marker tracking down Hitchcock, I always pause and replay the section about the Mission Dolores. This was the fictional location of the burial place of Carlotta Valdes, who is believed to be a possessing spirit from beyond the grave, like Rebecca in the 1940 film named for her and somewhat like the boy’s best friend in Psycho (1960), Norman Bates’s dead mother. Just on the level of daily business, and hopefully not in our mental states, many of us are currently living a little too much like Norman now, cooped up with our ghosts and unable to leave the grounds, “lighting the lights and following the formalities.” We’re the proprietors of empty businesses like the Bates Motel, with its “12 cabins, 12 vacancies.”

When I see the Mission Dolores, I am transported back in time to my loveable old haunted sublet on 16th Street, where the Mission bells were a regular aspect of my routine. The place had a ghost cat and the bedroom shivered during smaller earthquakes. I once found a child’s tooth in a drawer that I was convinced had not been there the month before. When I’m watching Vertigo, or Sans Soleil, I fully expect to see an image of myself haunting the edges of the picture, like the extra ghostly space inhabited by otherworldly figures at the margin of the screen in The Ring (2002). 

In another sequence from Sans Soleil set in Japan, Marker quotes Brando’s Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979) as he watches the film on television: “You must make a friend of horror.” Indeed, we must, yet we cannot manage it. This hideous virus attacks everything that makes us human, in particular our need for contact and love and going to the movies. It targets those who gather to mourn and to celebrate, to worship and to dance. We have to deny the horror, to look away, and to watch something else, no matter how trivial or profound. That’s one thing films are good for, but films can be more than distractions, of course. They are mirrors, portals, doors that we can open and pass through into the world and ourselves and the past.

Marker claims Vertigo as the only film that captures what he calls “impossible memory, insane memory.” But Marker is being characteristically modest. His own film is the only one that does that for me, or to me. Now that I cannot go anywhere, I feel like disappearing into this film altogether. Impossible and—yes—slightly mad.

Marker’s heart-stopping opening sequence features an “image of happiness,” three children walking along a road in Iceland holding hands. Later, Marker’s footage returns to Iceland to show how a volcano filled a fishing town with lava, up to the rooftops in some cases.

I’ve never been to Iceland but this form of “remote viewing” or tele-visual “action at a distance” gives me the chills. What makes the film all the more remarkable is that Marker created it without any scripted scenes, actors, lights, dialogue, producer, or studio. It’s a film that presages the whole DIY YouTube/smartphone video upload ethos. Could it or something like it be made today? I think so, if you already had the footage gathered from many years of travel. 

Yet to watch Sans Soleil now is to experience one peculiar heartbreak of our shared moment in which travel is impossible. Making future plans, however banal or luxurious, feels vital at the moment. I promise myself that I will finally visit Iceland when all this is over. Then I consult the pollution charts and see the planet breathing a little bit better now, and I make a vow to travel by cargo ship. Then I remember my horrible tendencies towards seasickness and vertigo. Then I recognize that I’ll likely be inside most of the time from now until . . . who knows when. Right now that’s the definition of a happy problem. Then I realize how everything I’m thinking and feeling today may pale into insignificance tomorrow as the crisis unfolds. The low-key impact of not going anywhere or doing much of anything at least doesn’t add to the problems of first responders. We’re told that staying home saves lives, but it’s difficult not to feel useless or even burdensome, even if doing nothing minimizes harm to others. And expressing gratitude does precious little to change the working conditions of those who must risk their health and safety. But art means there must be a future, and there is more to the belief in movies as a binding force for good. As one great line goes in Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), a film that dares to joke courageously at the darkest hour, “A laugh is nothing to be sneezed at.”

I’ve been reading that the Germans (who else) have a term for this feeling I’m having a lot right now, fernweh, a “farsickness” that counterpoints homesickness. As far as I understand the term, fernweh conveys a feeling of yearning for unexplored distant places—and, presumably, an enduring feeling of heartache related to missing all the things and people in those places that we feel we might never encounter. That is how it feels to me to be alive—alive!—in April 2020.


Interested in reading more about film? In summer 2018 we published a feature on Terrence Malick, including ten writers’ and one illustrator’s views on his films, from Badlands to Song to Song. To help you through the time with no movie theaters, we’ll be happy to send it to you for free! Click the following link and download NER 39.2 to your computer or mobile device:
E-pub for your iPad, iPhone, Nook, or computer.
MobiPocket for your Kindle.


J. M. Tyree is a nonfiction editor at NER, a contributing editor at Film Quarterly, and teaches at VCUarts. He is the coauthor of Our Secret Life in the Movies (with Michael McGriff), an NPR Best Books selection, and BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski (with Ben Walters). He is the author of BFI Film Classics: Salesman and Vanishing Streets – Journeys in London.

Calico cat on a silky striped pillow

Above: The author’s shared working space.

Photo captions for the gallery at the top (left to right, top to bottom):
Vertigo – Hang in there, kitten.
Chris Marker’s “image of happiness.”
From Marker’s Sans Soleil.
The author in a vanished era.

Filed Under: Editors' Notebooks, NER Digital, News & Notes Tagged With: Chris Marker, fernweh, J.M. Tyree, Sans Soleil

Elizabeth Kadetsky

Report from the Jaipur Literature Festival

March 6, 2020

Elizabeth Kadetsky in front of a sign for the Jaipur Literature Festival, wearing her press badge and standing with her young son, Alexander.
The reporter with her research assistant

“These are very dark times for India and the US. Delhi is in complete meltdown,” writes an author friend in India. The Jaipur Literature Festival, it might be said, is the place where the question feels most urgent: “Where do art and politics meet?” After five months in India, I felt my shoulders relax upon arriving at this forum for open discussion of so many topics taboo elsewhere in my travels—with panelists representing on gay rights, gay marriage, eschewing marriage altogether, Hindu supremacy, the conflict in Kashmir, the P word so rarely spoken in polite conversation (Pakistan). 

In Delhi, a friend who works for a major Indian corporation recently described how an e-mail from management asked a co-worker about his anti-government views. In Ladakh, Assam, and elsewhere, the Internet was shut down, and news of protests against the ruling Hindu nationalist government (might we call it fascist?) filtered out clandestinely. The theme was tied tongue. 

The CAA anti-Muslim immigration law had been unveiled in the final weeks of the previous year. The new decade brought violent protests and incalculably harsher anti-protest crackdowns by the state. Also, there was a government intent upon deflecting from the real problems at hand by casting blame upon Muslims in Kashmir and among the desperate immigrant population along the Bangladesh border. Plus, there was the encroaching of development upon natural habitats, including the roaming grounds of the 600 last Asiatic lions and the 3,000 last Indian Bengal tigers. And, it had been raining, only the monsoon was supposed to have ended months ago: bookmark, global warming. In 2020, the globe’s problems exist in boldface in India. 

Against this daunting backdrop, some 300 authors and political figures and (while it’s hard to get an official figure) as many as 100,000 spectators and reporters joined up for the 13th annual meeting of what the organizers call “a rewarding pilgrimage of the mind and spirit” and what Time Out Mumbai once called “the Woodstock, Live 8, and Ibiza of world literature, with an ambience that can best be described as James Joyce meets monsoon wedding.” 

Thronging happened. One elbowed through crowds in winding outdoor throughways connecting six event tents seating in the range of 500 spectator-participants each. Also vying for attention were tea stands, regional food stalls, a press terrace where one could eavesdrop on the likes of Elizabeth Gilbert, Suketu Mehta, William Dalrymble, and Shobhaa De. There was a handicrafts, ethnic wear, and fine linens bazaar, and a festival bookstore where kids crowded onto the floor reading Dog Man. Come evening, there was a “fashion showcase” and Indian classical performance at the sixteenth-century Amer Fort, and off-site music and art events at posh, New Delhi-style eateries offering curated martinis and pomegranate beer. 

By the weekend of the five day festival, it seemed, if not a fire hazard, sensory overload. Wrote a friend over WhatsApp, “too many kids … to see, be seen, and take selfies … I.e. be kids! Or as I was told to picnic. Although I don’t think the word picnic means the same here as it does to Americans.”

And yet, I thought, how often do teenagers back home flood literary festivals to the point they overtake, annoying the bookish adults? 

Nothing was correct or easy. Why were so many Western and non-Indian writers represented, why were there so many all-white panels, why were there so many all-male panels? Why was the Kashmiri Hindu poet from New Jersey, Rakesh Kaul, allowed to tell the Muslim author also from Kashmir, Asiya Zahoor, that her people’s protest movement was too “angry” and was out of keeping, in spirit, with the “beauty” of the Kashmiri language? “We have long been a part of a story which we have not authored,” Zahoor asserted. 

And yet for every misstep or error on the part of the organizers, the amount of audible criticism or debate on the same seemed to make it all, if not tolerable, exciting, engaged, and engaging. 

“I want to personally apologize,” responded panelist Fintan O’Toole in response to a question from the audience about the galling gender monotony on the panel “Present Tense,” about current events, climate issues, and water. Water, after all, is a female issue, said the questioner. “I didn’t know this would be an all-male panel and if I had I would have refused.” Another listener grumbled that the same speaker had been spotted on other all-male panels. 

At another forum, an audience member asked, in Hindi, “Why aren’t your panels in Hindi? We should be celebrating the Indian language. “I’m sorry, sir,” responded a panelist in English, if disingenuously. “I could understand you if you asked in Malayali, but I don’t speak Hindi.” 

Indeed, it seemed that at most every discussion, everyone had something to offend or to be offended by, and gluttonous audiences grasped at any opportunity to question, dissect, and call out. At the panel on Kashmir, people stood up and clapped and shouted to support one speaker, then others did the same for a speaker espousing the opposite. An elderly man in a Nehru jacket had to be physically coaxed back into his seat by the microphone bearer. 

I was left with a vivid impression: in India literature matters, and speaking the truth, whatever one’s truth is, is a privilege to be celebrated and undertaken with relish. 

  • Two boys sitting on the floor reading Dog Man books.
  • Author Varun Thomas Mathew
  • Brightly lit stage with three writers at microphones.

Elizabeth Kadetsky is a nonfiction editor at NER, and her new book is The Memory Eaters, a lyric memoir. She is spending the academic year in India as a Fulbright Scholar and attended the Jaipur Literature Festival (January 28 to February 1, 2020).

Filed Under: Dispatches, Editors' Notebooks, NER Digital, News & Notes

Cover art by Ralph Lazar

Volume 41, Number 4

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Writer’s Notebook—No Ruined Stone

Shara McCallum

Writer’s Notebook—No Ruined Stone

Answering such queries typically falls to novelists. But, being a poet, I felt compelled to ask poetry to respond.

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