Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends
ANNE APPLEBAUM
(ALLEN LANE, 224 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064
In 1999, the American Anne Applebaum and her husband, Radoslaw Sikorski, then a Polish government minister, held a New Year’s Eve party in Poland. It was a festive millennial occasion, where Applebaum remembers thinking that the world was their oyster – and that the principles for which both of them had fought had triumphed.
A journalist and writer, living in and reporting from several countries, Applebaum had long advocated moderate centre-right politics, European unity, Atlanticism, free markets and a free press. In 1999, that viewpoint appeared unassailable not only in Poland, but over most of the continent.
Twenty years on, and that bright dawn has given way to an overcast sunset. Applebaum’s adopted Polish homeland is no longer run by people like her husband but by paranoid nationalists who insist they have saved the country from a bewildering cast of Jewish plutocrats, European bureaucrats, Muslim jihadists, Communists, Russians and gay agitators. That gays are plotting to destroy Poland was a key theme in this July’s presidential election.