The New York Times #standswithBrussels in condemning Poland’s new conservative (let’s stick with that term for now) government.

Here’s an extract (my emphasis added):

[I]t should be made clear to the Polish government that its retreat from the fundamental values of liberal democracy is reprehensible and foolish.
Since its victory in national elections in late October, the nationalistic, euroskeptic Law and Justice Party led by the former prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has moved rapidly on its conservative agenda, packing the highest court with malleable judges, reducing the court’s ability to block legislation, imposing greater government control over the state-owned media, choosing a party stalwart previously convicted of abusing power to oversee the police and intelligence agencies and purging European Union flags from government press briefings.

There’s a genuine debate (and it is a debate) to be had about what the Law and Justice party is up to, but the idea that an occasional refusal to sport the EU’s flag is some sort of affront to democratic values is, well, nuts.

Reading this reminded me of an encounter in the Czech Republic in 2008 between Danny Cohn-Bendit, an MEP, who swapped leftist authoritarianism (he is a veteran of the May 1968 events in France) for the eurofundamentalist (and green) variety:

In Prague Castle, the presidential seat, Klaus is refusing to fly the European flag for the next six months. He came face-to-face there with another verbal brawler, Danny Cohn-Bendit, the Franco-German Green. The encounter pitted the arch Eurosceptic against an ardent Euro-federalist. Cohn-Bendit accosted Klaus, unfurled the European flag and demanded to know why it was not fluttering over the castle.
“No one has ever spoken to me here in this tone. You aren’t on the barricades of Paris. I have never heard anything so insolent in this hall,” Klaus spluttered. “The way Cohn-Bendit speaks to me is exactly the way the Soviets used to speak.”

Even if Klaus did indeed “splutter” (the report comes from the Guardian), it would have been understandable for the reasons that Klaus gave that day.

That might be something the New York Times might want to ponder.

Meanwhile the Times’ report on Poland concludes as follows:

Punishing Poland through sanctions would be counterproductive and even hypocritical, given the proliferation of like-minded parties across Europe. But that does not preclude European Union leaders from making clear to the Poles that Mr. Kaczynski’s politics are a damaging deviation from the democracy Poland so ardently embraced 25 years ago.

Yes, sanctions would indeed be counter-productive, just as they were against Austria a while back, but the hypocrisy would run far deeper than the newspaper suggests, and would involve rather more than the unpunished existence of other “like-minded” parties in Europe. Put bluntly, the EU has repeatedly shown itself to be no friend of democracy, free speech or the rule of law. It is in no position to give lectures to others.