Democracy Digest: Poland Faces New EU Infringement Procedure Over #LexTusk

After the unexpected success of the opposition march last Sunday in Warsaw, which put a record half a million people on the streets of the capital according to the organisers, democratic political parties seeking to defeat PiS in the general election are feeling emboldened. On Tuesday, Wlodzimierz Czarzasty from the Left proposed that the other parties in the liberal opposition sign a "pact for the Sejm", similar to the one arranged for the Senate before the previous election, which is credited with the opposition marginally controlling that chamber today. According to Czarzasty's proposal, the pact would commit all parties to not attacking one another during the campaign and also to working together to govern post-election. "Let's not waste what we were able to achieve during the march on Sunday," Czarzasty said. "Let's show people that we want to cooperate." While the idea of all opposition parties running on a joint list has been discussed widely, in the end parties appear determined to run separately in three major ideological blocks - the left, the moderate Catholics, and the most centrist and largest party Civic Platform (the actual organiser of Sunday's march). Cooperation between all the democratic forces also can't be taken for granted: independent Catholic Szymon Holownia and his allies from the Agrarian Party were close to not taking part in Sunday's march, though they ultimately did so after a last-minute change of heart.

A small protest was organised on Tuesday evening in front of the Russian embassy in Warsaw in reaction to the bombing of the Nova Kakhovka dam, which Ukraine accuses Russia of carrying out. Occupied by the Russian army since the second day of the full-scale invasion, the burst dam can now no longer hold its reservoir, which is...