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On Thursday will take place a discussion on political and legal developments in contemporary Poland. The seminar begins with professor David Ost's talk "Populist Revolution in Poland: What Kaczynski's Government Means for Europe, Russia and Democracy"

Since coming to power in November 2015, Jaroslaw Kaczynski's Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) has forced through fundamental changes in almost all aspects of politics, tantamount to regime change from above. David Ost, an American professor who has written widely on Poland and just returned from a 4-month stay in Warsaw, asks how it is possible (or whether it was inevitable) that a society that started Solidarity came to embrace a radical nationalist program like Kaczynski's. How did Kaczynski gain power? What does his success, like Orban's in Hungary, mean for Poland and for the European Union? Why is Putin sympathetic to this kind of politics in Europe? Does this kind of government jeopardize democracy or strengthen it?