Anne Applebaum / ‘Often, for autocrats, the second time in power is worse’

Anne Applebaum: ‘The motivation of autocrats is only power and wealth.’ Photograph: Suki Dhanda/

Interview

Pulitzer-winning author Anne Applebaum: ‘Often, for autocrats, the second time in power is worse’

The journalist tells of her fears for democracy’s future, the dangers of another Trump presidency and how her husband became Poland’s foreign minister

Tim Adams

Sunday 21 July 2024

Acouple of years ago, in the Atlantic magazine, journalist Anne Applebaum wrote an era-defining cover story called “The Bad Guys Are Winning”. Her argument was not only that democratic institutions were in decline across the world, but that there was a new version of old threats to them: rogue states and dictatorships were increasingly linked not by ideology, as in the cold war, but by powerful currents of criminal and mercenary interest, often enabled by western corporations and technology.

Illustration by Malte Mueller

Thirty books to help us understand the world in 2020

The climate crisis, gender, populism, big tech, pandemics, race… our experts recommend titles to illuminate the issues of the day

Anne Applebaum, Michael Mann, Jeffrey Boakye, Helen Lewis, Laura Spinney, John Naughton

Sunday 18 October 2020

Michael E Mann on the environment

A distinguished climatologist and geophysicist, Michael Mann is director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications, as well as four books, including 2012’s The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars and his forthcoming The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, due out in January 2021 (Public Affairs Books).

Anne Applebaum / Poland’s Rulers Made Up a ‘Rainbow Plague’

 

The newly reelected president of Poland, Andrzej Duda
Photo by PETR DAVID JOSEK

Poland’s Rulers Made Up a ‘Rainbow Plague’

The president and his party ginned up fear of LGBTQ people—and rode that strategy to reelection.

Anne Applebaum
Staff writer at The Atlantic
JULY 14, 2020

Rare is the election campaign that truly hinges on a single issue. But in the run-up to Sunday’s presidential election in Poland, “LGBT”—an English acronym that sounds strange and foreign in Polish—was unquestionably the dominant theme. The coronavirus pandemic is still ravaging the world, an economic crisis looms, and international politics are in turmoil. Yet when the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, declared that “LGBT are not people; they are an ideology”—and for that matter an ideology “even more destructive” than communism—the statement instantly became the most widely discussed moment of the campaign.