Diagnoses and solutions
Throughout the last few months, our Programme Team has been diagnosing the biggest issues that have been troubling our region, state, and continent. Based on those diagnoses, we alongside a few experts were trying to come up with solutions to the biggest problems and challenges. On this site we present our proposals for changes which will make our region a better place to live. We are aware, that there is still a lot of work ahead of us, so we encourage everyone interested in the matters of regionalism to join our Team and work with us.
New proposals will be published soon!!!
The last few years have exposed the instability of the polish legal system, and its dependency from political interest groups and outside pressure. This period also showed us the weakness of the parliamentary mechanisms and the atrocious level of the political culture and politicians alike in our country. Legislative processes, the legal system, law enforcements, public policies and diplomacy are being used to realise contemporary goals of the ruling parties, staying outside of democratic control by the citizens. The polish state is a caricature of the democratic and republican values, using social manipulation as the means to realise the interests of the political elites.
We believe, that the Senate, as a separate chamber of the Parliament representing the regions, independent from the political situation in the Sejm, should take the main role of stabilising the legal system, the judiciary system, and the foreign policy. We also propose to limit the possible terms for the MPs to no more than 3 in a row, and to get rid of the parliamentary immunity. Going further, the local governments should be included in the process of appointing judges and prosecutors, which will eliminate the central government’s ability to control the judiciary.
The current political system promotes a centralist model of governing the country and the economy, making the people’s wellness dependant on the will of individual people or interest groups. The local governments are limited barely to implementing the central government’s policies. Rising amounts of duties, resulting from the central government’s decisions, are not accompanied by bigger funds for the local governments’ budgets. Additionally, the authorities create mechanisms which make the local governments financially dependant on the central government, which can use the distribution of public funds to the local governments as a tool to corrupt and blackmail them politically. Additionally we can see the “quality and values” that come with the centralised political system of the polish state – nepotism, corruption, impunity of the government officials, and notorious usage of lies, hypocrisy and manipulation as the main tools to realise the polish reason of state.
Most western european states has a decentralised governing system, based on the federal or regionalist model. Similar solution in our country will make the administrative processes more efficient, improve the quality of our democracy, and civilise the political scene. We believe, that we need a reform of the local governments eliminating the dualism of power in voivodeships, strengthening the local governments in favour of the centrally-apointed voivodes. A step with a similar importance would be to reverse the taxflow. In the model we propose, the taxes will firstly go to the local governments, which later will give a portion of them to the central budget. From the increased funds, the local governments will have to independently realise the educational, cultural, and regional development policies. We also propose that when it comes to the European Union funds, more of them should be given for the programmes realised directly between the EU and the regions.