"On 24 August 1989, Polish parliament appointed Tadeusz Mazowiecki as prime minister. Soviet troops were still stationed in Poland, and the Berlin Wall stood intact. We were treading on thin ice…,’ writes Gazeta Wyborcza today. Mazowiecki thus became the first postwar non-communist head of government in Poland. His candidacy had been put forward by Adam Michnik, editor in chief of Wyborcza, in what eventually turned out to have been an epoch-making article entitled "Your President, Our Prime Minister." Michnik’s idea met with a hostile reception in Solidarity circles and one of its sharpest critics was Mazowiecki himself. "Following the 4 June elections, the communists, still shocked by their defeat, didn’t want to cede power. And Solidarity, still shocked by its victory, didn’t really want to take it," remembers Roman Malinowski, then head of the communist-allied United Peasant Party (ZSL), in an interview for Gazeta, adding that Lech Wałęsa was pivotal in overcoming the impasse. It was through his mediation that the Polish United Workers’ Party’s former allies – the ZSL and the Democratic Party (SD) – switched sides and allied themselves with Solidarity, making the election possible.
The leader of Greece’s leftist alliance SYRIZA is the new bright hope of Greek politics. Steering a course between pragmatism and the rhetoric of class warfare, he has unsettled Berlin, and not just those who back Angela Merkel's austerity policies. 
Europe’s economic woes have forced us to try to understand the secret Olympian world of global finance. But now that we pay more attention to bond yields and stability mechanisms, isn’t it clear that the experts up on their lofty peaks don’t know what’s going on either? 
This year’s Eurovision Song Contest is hosted by Azerbaijan, a country that is far from being a model democracy. An Estonian journalist takes a critical look at the deferential treatment enjoyed by the regime in Baku.