In Poland, we’ve gone from semi-dictatorship to democracy in days. Isn’t that great? | Witold Szabłowski

Any prospect of Polexit is now off the cards - the election results put us (unlike the poor Brits) back inside the EU tent

Ten days ago, my friends and I watched the performance of a strange play on Polish public television. Billed as a pre-election debate (indeed, the only pre-election TV debate), it featured people dressed up like journalists, acting the parts of journalists who asked the candidates such Orwellian questions as - I am paraphrasing - Do you want Poland to be rich and secure, like it is now, or would you rather that it was poor?"

It was at this moment that we realised just how far Poland had strayed from even a semblance of democratic standards. Eight years ago, when PiS - the Law and Justice party - came to power for the first of two terms in government, nobody would have thought of hijacking public television for the propaganda aims of one party. This time, nobody was remotely surprised. The national broadcaster TVP was fully captured by PiS.

Witold Szabowski is the author of How to Feed a Dictator. His book What's Cooking in the Kremlin: A Modern History of Russia Through the Kitchen Door, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is published on 7 November