By Wiktor Babinski
Saturday, May 18, 2024
For 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment