On Sunday, 500,000 people marched peacefully through the streets of Warsaw. The occasion marked the 34th anniversary of elections that led to Poland’s nonviolent exit from communism. But the mass showing was no ritual commemoration; it was both a celebration of the past and a protest against the current Polish government’s effort to return the country to autocracy.

The ruling Law and Justice Party government had spent the previous week mocking the march’s organizers and discouraging Poles from participating. On its official Twitter account, the party even went so far as to publish an outrageous video spot featuring footage of train tracks in front of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp with The June 4th March superimposed over the camp’s entrance. A few politicians walked back their party’s attempt to weaponize Auschwitz, but the offensiveness of the spot stoked public anxiety in the week leading up to June 4: Would Law and Justice try to shut down the march? Would the two dozen “counterprotests” approved for the same day become a pretext for violent provocations by some of the far-right organizations that draw government subsidies?

[From the October 2018 issue: A warning from Europe]

Elections are often written off as boring procedural exercises; even in free societies, without state TV channels that drown out the opposition with progovernment propaganda, opponents have a hard time mobilizing voters to dislodge the ruling party. Why, then, should commemorating the anniversary of elections held more than three decades ago strike such fear into the hearts of Poland’s governing elite?

Contemporaries worldwide are more likely to remember June 4, 1989, as the day when 200,000 Chinese troops made the streets of Beijing run red with the blood of protesting students and bystanders. Halfway around the world from Tiananmen Square, however, Poles had spent the day voting in their freest elections since the 1920s. That exercise led to an extraordinary, previously unthinkable moment: Poland’s autocratic, Moscow-backed communists voluntarily surrendered power, acknowledging that the Solidarity movement had overwhelmingly defeated them at the polls.

In the words of the historian Timothy Garton Ash, who observed the elections firsthand, “until almost the day before, anyone who had predicted these events would have been universally considered not a logician but a lunatic.” Mikhail Gorbachev was already celebrated across the Soviet Bloc for his reforms at home, but Poles took seriously the risk that he might green-light a Red Army intervention to keep communists in power. News of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which broke simultaneously with the Polish election results, heightened these worries. Instead, Gorbachev blessed the results, and Solidarity created a coalition government led by Eastern Europe’s first noncommunist prime minister in decades.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the election that brought down communism in Poland was therefore celebrated. But the Law and Justice Party has spent a good part of the past two decades convincing voters that the 1989 election should instead be a source of shame: Communists should have been hanged; dissidents who made the 1989 elections possible sold Poland out for a quick buck; and Poland is still governed by a shadow conspiracy.

The bottom-line message from Law and Justice is that most Polish voters should stay home, even if they worry that Poland is currently governed by autocratic xenophobes, because the only alternative is an opposition that will sell Poland out to the Russians—and that derives from a political lineage that has been doing so since the 1980s. What once was a fringe position on the right is now mainstream in Poland. Parliamentary elections are coming up this fall, and Law and Justice fears a loss, so it is making full use of antidemocratic tactics honed over eight years in government: subordinating the judiciary to elected politicians, turning public media into government-propaganda outlets, and fomenting culture wars.

Throughout 2022, experts imagined that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine might reverse Poland’s antidemocratic course, with the European Union and NATO seeing Poland as their anti-Russian bulwark. Alas, this was wishful thinking. In March, TVN, a majority-U.S.-owned television station, aired a documentary revealing that Pope John Paul II had been entangled in clerical abuse in communist Poland. The U.S. ambassador was summoned to the foreign ministry to answer for the TV station’s involvement in “hybrid warfare.” The import was clear: Challenging the government-sanctioned image of a heroic Poland, symbolized by a saintly pope, threatens NATO, because NATO needs Poland.

Scholarly lectures that provide evidence of Polish anti-Semitic violence during the Holocaust are now regularly, even violently, disrupted. Just last week at Warsaw’s German Historical Institute, a far-right parliamentarian staged a sit-in to prevent a lecture on government censorship of Holocaust research. He flashed his official ID at police trying to evict him, claiming that it afforded him immunity. The would-be speaker, the distinguished historian Jan Grabowski, was spirited out the building’s back door to avoid violence by right-wing protesters. He said, “I felt like I was in Poland in the 1930s.”

What brought Poland to a frenzy in the week leading up to Sunday’s anniversary goes beyond culture wars in alleged defense of Poland’s public image. On May 29, Polish President Andrzej Duda signed into law a bill creating a new standing commission to investigate Russian influence in Poland from 2007 to 2022. The commission is empowered to investigate any citizen, without obligation to produce documentation. Rather than a narrowly defined mandate, the law contains vague wording (it provides no definition of Russian influence) that affords the Parliament-appointed commission almost limitless scope: It can break the legal protections surrounding confidential business dealings; it can pierce attorney-client privilege.

[From the December 1962 issue: Poland]

Polish civil-society critics have focused primarily on what the law means for elections, because the commission can ban anyone from public office for 10 years. Law and Justice lawmakers have been vocal about their intention to use the law against Poland’s main opposition politician, former Prime Minister and former European Council President Donald Tusk. (Opponents call the new law “Lex Tusk.”) But the law declares that the commission also has wide powers to reverse or declare null and void any “administrative decision that was rendered under Russian influence to the detriment of the interests of the Polish Republic.” The commission can unilaterally cancel contracts in commercial sectors connected to “critical infrastructure,” such as energy and information technology, with potentially catastrophic implications for business investment in Poland. And all of the commission’s determinations are final: They are nominally subject to an administrative court appeal, but that court can only verify that the commission acted according to the law that created it. For all intents and purposes, the politically appointed, administrative commission wields supreme judicial power.

The law is Polish McCarthyism, plain and simple. On May 29, the State Department released a press statement noting, “We share the concerns expressed by many observers that this law to create a commission to investigate Russian influence could be used to block the candidacy of opposition politicians without due process.” The European Parliament voted to debate the new Polish law. A former Polish prime minister (now a Law and Justice MEP) responded by promising to punish Poles who used “the European Parliament to incite rebellion in Poland, calling openly for people to go out into the streets.”

Jarosław Kurski, an influential commentator in Poland, noted on Sunday that it was no longer possible to separate the celebration of the country’s peaceful 1989 revolution from “fury at the shameless and incompetent governance of Law and Justice.” The turnout of a half million was 10 times what organizers had predicted—it amounted to one-third of Warsaw’s population—and that number does not even include the smaller marches across Poland’s major cities.

The far right planned to meet these demonstrations with counterprotests, but clearly 500,000 people could not be stopped even by violent far-right provocateurs. Yet Law and Justice doesn’t need to send police or fascist gangs into city streets to shut down political opposition. In the fall of 2020, more than 400,000 Poles protested the effective elimination of abortion rights by the Law and Justice–controlled Constitutional Tribunal; in the end, the government waited out the protests, then enforced the abortion ban.

Poles have taken June 4 back as a symbol of hope that one election can reverse an autocratic tide. Now comes the hard part: translating Sunday’s turnout in Warsaw’s streets into votes at the polls this autumn.

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