My comment on Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum review — the historian takes aim at political elites who have succumbed to the lure of populism by Trevor Philips in The Sunday Times, 19 July 2020.
AA's narrative is made-up. The roles of democrats are played by Communists, their subordinates and their children. The biggest of them all in Poland is Adam Michnik, whose parents were hard core Communists. His father was a Soviet agent, acting on behalf of Stalin's Soviet Union against the Polish state. Michnik was cast in the role of a democratic 'dissident' of the Communist regime as part of the general strategy of managed changes of the outward appearance of the dictatorship.
The point is that there was no democratic transition in Poland in 1989-90. It was a velvet transition from above-the-line dictatorship to below-the-line dictatorship.
The first allegedly democratic PM of Poland in 1989 was Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a former three-time member of the Communist 'Parliament'. His best election result was 98.92 percent of the vote in 1969. Not bad at all.
The same goes for Hanna Suchocka, another 'non-Communist' PM in the 1990s, an earlier member of the Communist 'Parliament'.
Some other post-1990 PMs:
Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, Communist Party Member
Leszek Miller, Communist Party member
Marek Belka, Communist Party member
Ewa Kopacz, PM during 2014-2015, was a member of PSL in the 1980s, a Communist-satellite party fully controlled by the Communists
