A volatile back-and-forth contest between liberals and populists has marked the nation’s politics over the past decade-plus. Is a more stable future possible?
A volatile back-and-forth contest between liberals and populists has marked the nation’s politics over the past decade-plus. Is a more stable future possible?
F or the past several months, Poland has been torn by political storms that send ripples across the conservative and liberal media here in America. Last October, a historically high election turnout swept away the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS), abruptly ending its eight years of total domination of Polish politics. Donald Tusk, a political juggernaut and liberal icon, returned for a second ride as prime minister of Poland (his first was from 2007 to 2014) following several years serving as president of the European Council.
Immediately after taking office, Tusk plunged into a head-on collision with the vestiges of PiS rule. Just weeks into the new government’s term, based on a complicated and contentious legal interpretation, the new minister of culture, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, dismissed the directors of public television and radio, and of the Polish Press Agency. This was immediately followed by a physical standoff between politicians of the former ruling party and the police in front of the public-television building, which was occupied by protesting dismissed employees for the next several weeks.
Not long afterwards Poland exploded again, as law-enforcement agents entered the presidential palace and arrested two individuals whom President Andrzej Duda, who won the presidency on a PiS ballot, was sheltering. The men — Mariusz Kamiński and Maciej Wąsik — are the former minister of internal affairs and his deputy. Both were seeking refuge in the president’s mansion after being sentenced by a court, following a trial that dragged on for years, to two years in prison for abuse of power. The president sheltered them, claiming they were free because of his earlier pardon decree, the legality of which the court disputed on procedural grounds. After a few weeks in county jail, Kamiński and Wąsik were pardoned again by Duda — this time in accordance with procedure — and released.
The whole saga has drawn howls of protest from conservative politicians and pundits in America who decry liberal authoritarianism. The American Left, on the other hand, has been quick to praise Tusk and dismiss his opponents’ concerns out of hand, drawing easy parallels to the Trump–Biden dynamic. Both reactions are somewhat understandable. The fault lines in Poland mimic a political and cultural struggle taking place all throughout the West. The PiS government was considered conservative, and in the global culture war often took positions similar or at least recognizable to those on the right across the rest of Europe and America. On the other hand Tusk, a former top EU official and celebrated vanquisher of populism, conjures up the worst fears of British and American conservatives.
Unfortunately none of those high-pitched reactions are too accurate or helpful. Squeezing the political crisis in Poland into familiar frameworks or looking at its protagonists only through the lens of our own fears and aspirations will do nothing except arouse emotions and confirm biases. Using Tusk and Duda to make a point about Biden and Trump, or invoking Poland’s tense relationship with the European Union while really having Brexit in mind, does not enhance our perceptions of Poland, Britain, or America. Instead, we should look at it through a different framework: one of revolution and counterrevolution. This approach will hopefully help us understand what is actually happening in Poland. More importantly, it may also be useful as a metaphor for what is happening closer to home.
One should look at the reign of PiS between 2015 and 2023 as a revolution started on the right side of the aisle. Poland before 2015 was not ruled by a progressive government nor under assault by the radical cultural left. Woke progressivism was, and remains, a cultural curiosity copied from the U.S. by a few impressionable big-city youths, wholly inadequate to the Polish context. The center-right coalition which gave way to PiS in 2015 was composed of mostly de‑ideologized former neoliberals and cold warriors (no need to look far: in his 30s Tusk co‑founded Poland’s first openly neoliberal party) who supported fiscal austerity and boring centrist politics. Its sins were indifference and arrogance, not zeal and abuse.
It would likewise be quite a stretch to say that by 2015 Poland had chafed under the yoke of the Eurocratic bureaucracy, like most American and British conservatives instinctually assume. Of course, even before coming to power the political outlook of PiS was tinged with Euroscepticism. Integration with Europe was, however, by no means an existential issue for PiS. In this, the party broadly reflected popular attitudes. According to the national pollster, support for EU membership stood at 81 percent in Poland in 2015, and only 36 percent of the electorate considered it too constraining of national sovereignty. EU-related issues were muted in the 2015 campaign, except for a controversial EU project of relocating illegal migrants to alleviate the pressure on southern states like Italy, under siege during the migration crisis of that year. The fiery and much‑publicized conflict between Warsaw and Brussels came later, as a largely unintended by-product of the populist revolution.
It was only when PiS started packing judicial institutions after coming to power and Brussels reacted with criticism that events followed their own political logic, with both sides doubling down on their actions and rhetoric, thereby creating a much-exaggerated perception of the conflict. In reality, while the dispute between PiS and European institutions was real and dramatic, it did not translate into social attitudes. Even after eight years of a cold war between Warsaw and Brussels, the percentage of the Polish electorate that views the EU as too constraining of national sovereignty rose only slightly, from 36 to 45 percent between 2015 and 2023, while support for EU membership actually increased from 81 to 85 percent.
It may be difficult to conceptualize self-professed conservatives as revolutionaries, but that is what happened in Poland over the past eight years. Since its founding in 2001, the party chaired by Jarosław Kaczyński has excelled in fighting real and imagined conspiracies and corruption. A case in point: Kamiński and Wąsik, the ex-ministers delivered to prison this January, were sentenced for overstepping their authority while investigating a corruption scheme. The mentality of the party’s true believers is essentially revolutionary: The world is a dark place tainted by injustice, but it can be repaired if we overcome the powerful forces allied against us. One could fill a whole book with quotes from Kaczyński about the “united forces of evil” and such. In its early years, the party campaigned on a promise of founding the “Fourth Republic.” (The system that has existed in Poland since 1989 is informally considered the Third Republic, succeeding the First [1569–1795] and the Second [1918–1939].)
Of course, the party’s revolutionary narrative was not completely divorced from reality. It appealed to very real grievances — mostly in rural and small-town populations feeling left behind by the economic boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. It railed against global and local elites who embraced the triumph of liberalism in 1989 as an unqualified success, consigning anyone who disagreed to irrelevance. In this sense, the Polish revolution was very much in sync with the global populist momentum.
Upon coming to power in 2015, PiS set out on an ambitious and uncompromising campaign to remake the Polish state. Wielding an absolute majority in parliament while controlling the government and the presidency, the party was able to steamroll not only voices of dissent but also previously inviolable norms and institutions. It packed the constitutional court, thoroughly purged the civil service and public media, and launched an attack on the Supreme Court and the rest of the judiciary. Even President Andrzej Duda himself drew accusations of treachery from his party’s base when he vetoed a controversial judicial-reform bill because, as his critics said, the grand project of rejuvenating the state (read: revolution) would not be complete until it was total.
Revolutions have the tendency to burn in their own fire, and a similar scenario transpired in Poland. In time, some of the excesses of the Polish revolution managed to alienate voters beyond the traditionally anti-PiS electorate. The public media, for example, were so thoroughly subjugated to the ruling party’s line that even its supporters quietly acknowledged the farce. A bonanza of favoritism in the remade public sector (which is substantial in Poland) likewise turned off many frugal voters dismayed by the exorbitant salaries that the party’s appointees pocketed on state-owned companies’ boards. A landmark public-relations defeat came when the packed constitutional court ruled abortion illegal, overturning three decades of conservative-leaning compromise — by any measure a hugely unpopular move that sparked massive protests. Some of the last nails in the party’s coffin included a corruption scandal in the foreign ministry in which political appointees allegedly sold visas to individuals from Asia and the Middle East even while the government railed against migration. Despite everything, PiS retained its base come Election Day in 2023, but was swept out of power by a historically high turnout from the rest of the electorate.
The liberal coalition (where “liberal” means not “left-wing” but the opposite of “populist”) came into power united by a determination to reverse the revolution started by PiS at all costs. But this is easier said than done. Before 2015, even in the throes of bitter political struggle, one could say that there was a body of constitutional law and normative consensus which was respected across the political spectrum. The PiS thoroughly obliterated that consensus by packing countless institutions and issuing legally questionable decrees, leaving Poland in a constitutional grey zone in which rules that once acted as a universal reference point have been swept away.
This was described way back in 2020 by none other than Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, Tusk’s trusted right-hand man, who, as minister of culture, led the assault on the PiS presence in public media this year. In an essay four years ago, Sienkiewicz wrote: “We live in a country that has cut all bonds connecting it to the constitutional and legal order. The fact that PiS is responsible for this process does not really matter anymore. There are no longer any rules of politics determined by the law.” He declared that there was no going back to the pre-2015 order and that Poland needed a “wise counterrevolution” to establish a new consensus around which politics could be conducted.
Over the past several months we have observed the unfolding of the counterrevolution that Sienkiewicz prophesied four years ago. The new government has reclaimed the levers of the state from PiS holdovers, turning the system of will‑of‑the‑people absolutism created over the past eight years against the revolutionaries themselves. Its professed goal is to return Poland to some ill-defined pre-2015 normalcy, but after eight years of constitutional upheaval, the pre‑populist era that Polish liberals fondly look back to might be as achievable as the ancien régime was in the France of 1815. As Sienkiewicz himself correctly noted four years ago, what is possible is at best the creation of a new normal — an end to the revolutionary cycle that would see everyone stop questioning the legitimacy of constitutional rules and agree to conduct politics within self-imposed limits.
For months this normalization seemed far from sight, as both sides created their own interpretations of the law and held on to them for dear life, levying accusations of treason and illegality at one another. But recent weeks show that there might still be a light at the end of this tunnel for Poland. In March, Tusk and Duda embarked on an unprecedented joint visit to the White House, where they projected unity in front of President Biden, arguing for strong Polish-American relations in a reinvigorated NATO. In a geopolitically dangerous environment, national security seems to be the rare issue able to bridge the populist–liberal chasm on the Polish political scene.
There are also other signs of a thaw. In early June, after the European-wide election, Poland will send new deputies to the European Parliament. Tusk decided to place Sienkiewicz in a safe seat in the contest for European mandates that will most likely see the embattled politician depart for a cozy retirement in Brussels, his controversial mission now completed. His replacement as minister of culture will be a technocratic art historian and curator. Another two politicians who’ve found themselves running for safe seats in the European elections are none other than Kamiński and Wąsik. By helping them win seats in the European Parliament, the PiS chairman Kaczyński chose to resolve a controversy over their voided Polish parliamentary mandates that would have otherwise haunted Polish politics for years to come.
This shows that both sides of the liberal–populist struggle in Poland are in fact willing to take a step back from the undeclared civil war. If the liberal counterrevolution is to end the revolutionary cycle in Poland, both sides will need to keep following this pattern, with victors asserting their case while leaving some breathing space, and the defeated accepting the rules of the game. Otherwise, when the pendulum swings in a couple of years we will see this upheaval play out all over again, until perhaps someone decides to break the pendulum itself.
Every age has its own dialectic. Our age’s seems to be the populist-vs.-liberal one. The case of Poland reminds us that societies where this tension erupts into an unrestrained revolution which consumes norms and institutions tend to pay the highest price, devolving into authoritarianism or permanent political instability. In ages past, France and Russia have shown us cautionary examples of this, while Britain and the United States displayed the advantages of restraint and moderation. Poland in the populist era can still go either way. While Poles grapple with the consequences of their revolution, America should watch, learn, and take notes as it approaches a presidential election whose outcome might be contested in more ways than one.