All solutions were flawed, but the most flawed was to do nothing, and to do nothing slowly.” That is what Julian Barnes wrote about how to deal with past crimes in The Porcupine, his 1992 novel about the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Today in Poland, where Prime Minister Donald Tusk is trying to restore liberal democracy after eight years of populist rule, this advice seems more than timely. Rather than do nothing, Tusk is taking the opposite approach: he is moving quickly and decisively to rehabilitate Poland’s public institutions and loosen the grip that the right-wing Law and Justice party had on virtually all spheres of public life, from the judiciary and the media to the military, the education system and museums.
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