In Poland, next month’s parliamentary elections may be the opposition’s last, best chance to stop the country’s slide into autocracy. Along with Hungary, Poland once counted as a paradigmatic success story for a postcommunist transition to democracy. But also like Hungary, that reputation started to sour when far-right populists surged to power in the 2010s.
What happens in Poland is the more consequential because it is by far the largest Central or Eastern European country in the European Union. Its location—bordering Ukraine, Belarus, the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, and the Baltic Sea—gives it immense geopolitical importance. It has a more powerful military than neighboring Germany. And according to some projections, its GDP per capita is even set to overtake Britain’s by the end of the decade.
The populist Law and Justice party secured a majority in Poland’s parliament, and won the largely ceremonial presidency, in 2015. Soon after, Jarosław Kaczyński, the party’s leader, who is widely understood to exercise the real power in the land, held a long meeting with Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán—and promptly went to work implementing hisplaybook.
A decade ago, most political scientists thought of Hungary as a consolidated democracy, a country whose economic prosperity and political institutions were sufficiently robust to weather almost any challenge. In the country today, few independent media outlets remain, key political institutions are under the control of partisan hacks, and Orbán exerts tremendous sway over social and cultural life.
Following suit, Law and Justice has eroded the independence of the country’s judicial system. First, the party forced several sitting justices on the Supreme Court into retirement, replacing them with loyalists who then commanded a majority (an EU court later found the government’s new retirement rule unlawful). It also increased government officials’ ability to determine which judge would hear what case. Finally, it packed a reformed Constitutional Tribunal, the body charged with judicial review in Poland, with political appointees who have the power to suspend judges who displease the government.
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The government also undermined the independence of the media. Public broadcasting channels turned into propaganda networks that dropped any pretense of neutrality. The coverage of senior officials borders on the hagiographic. Meanwhile, opposition figures are routinely smeared as lapdogs of Germany or Russia (or, somehow, both)—or as criminals, perverts, and pedophiles.
This makes the next weeks an especially perilous time for Polish democracy. If Law and Justice somehow manages to win reelection, further democratic backsliding seems almost inevitable.
Both the abuse of the rule of law and the demonization of the opposition have gone into overdrive this year. Prominent businessmen who have criticized the government or otherwise thwarted it are languishing in pretrial detention on dubious charges. “The standards for detaining people have been lowered tragically,” Przemysław Rosati, the president of Poland’s bar council, told the Financial Times last month. “People are spending a long time in prison without taking into account their basic rights, including the presumption of innocence.”
In another move designed to hamper the opposition, Parliament voted to open a commission to investigate Russian influence in Polish politics earlier this year—a move widely seen as aimed at discrediting Civic Platform, the country’s largest opposition party. The commission’s makeup is wholly partisan, and its bylaws do not grant the accused even basic procedural rights. Widespread public outrage forced the government to walk back some of the commission’s most blatantly antidemocratic prerogatives, such as the power to exclude anyone found guilty from public office for up to 10 years, but it remains a powerful means of maligning opposition leaders.
Although the rule of law and the opposition’s ability to compete in elections are deeply compromised, the fight for Polish democracy is far from over. In Hungary, where democratic decline is more advanced, the opposition is reduced to a demoralized rump, and Orbán controls the airwaves. In Poland, independent television stations still draw millions of viewers. A lively set of newspapers and periodicals scrutinize the government’s actions. The opposition retains significant influence in the country’s upper chamber, dominates city halls throughout the country, and leads many regional governments, especially in western Poland.
All of this raises the stakes for the parliamentary elections scheduled for October 15. If the Law and Justice party succeeds in winning a third mandate, the worrying trends of the past eight years are likely to accelerate. By the time of the next election, in 2027, the country’s political system might look like a carbon copy of Hungary’s. If, however, the opposition does well enough to form the next government, one of the most powerful countries in Europe could be back on track toward sustaining a genuine democracy. But can democratic forces manage to oust authoritarian populists from power through the ballot box, as they did in the United States in 2020 and in Brazil in 2022?
After Donald Tusk became prime minister in 2007, Civic Platform seemed to become Poland’s natural governing party: It pursued moderate social and economic policies, deepened the country’s ties to the EU and the United States, and sustained rapid economic growth. But the party also failed to expand its support beyond its traditional strongholds in major cities and the more affluent parts of western Poland. In 2015, Law and Justice surged to power, thanks to the support of the less urban, less affluent part of the electorate.
Civic Platform’s years in the wilderness left it looking disoriented. Tusk, who became president of the European Council at the end of 2014, was away in Brussels. Despite running a spirited campaign, Civic Platform failed to defeat the government in 2019. By 2021, its support sank to a record low of 16 percent. Many party loyalists grew convinced that only Tusk’s return could repair its fortunes.
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Tusk resumed leadership of Civic Platform two years ago, and the party quickly started to recover. But its support, which rose to a healthier 26 percent, has since stalled, and, according to the latest polls, it still trails Law and Justice by five to 10 percentage points. If elections were held today, neither party would be predicted to win an outright majority. Such an outcome might put Poland’s fate in the hands of an upstart movement: Confederation.
So called because it originated in a merger between a libertarian and a far-right party, Confederation has struck a chord with voters—particularly young male voters—who are frustrated with the political establishment. In an election that pits a former two-term prime minister against an incumbent two-term government, the party’s promise of a radical break with the past has proved resonant.
Part of Confederation’s appeal is economic. In 2015, Law and Justice won over swing voters by pretending to have moderated on social issues and promising to increase spending in favor of ordinary families. To win back those voters, Civic Platform has moved left on economic issues, voting with the government to expand child benefits and other welfare measures. This has given Confederation an opportunity to campaign on lower taxes and benefits.
But Confederation’s core appeal consists in its harsh rhetoric about ethnic and religious minorities—rhetoric that outbids even Law and Justice’s frequent resort to bigotry. In a speech in 2019, a Confederation leader named Sławomir Mentzen summed up the movement’s program in five pithy points: “We don’t want Jews, homosexuals, abortion, taxes, and the European Union.” In another video that recently emerged, Witold Tumanowicz, the party’s campaign chief, pledged a national register of gay people.
If neither Law and Justice nor Civic Platform wins a majority, the outcome may hinge on Confederation. Would its leaders enter into a marriage of convenience with Civic Platform? And would Civic Platform be willing to tolerate Confederation’s extremism to protect the country’s democratic institutions from an increasingly authoritarian government? There is no way of knowing.
Another vagary stems from the uncertain performance of smaller opposition movements. Poland’s electoral system is mostly proportional, but a relatively high electoral threshold makes predicting which parties and coalitions will be represented in Parliament difficult. If the country’s decimated left or a new centrist coalition does not clear the bar, votes will be redistributed among the parties that do. Such a scenario could, as happened in 2015 and 2019, help Law and Justice win a majority in Parliament without winning a majority of the popular vote.
A final uncertainty is whether the ruling party would accept the result if it lost, allowing a peaceful transfer of power despite its hold over the country’s institutions. During the campaign, Law and Justice has used all the levers at its disposal to gain unfair advantage. When Polish citizens go to vote, their ballot will include referendum questions tendentiously worded to insinuate that the opposition would sell off state assets to foreign entities, increase the retirement age, and flood the country with illegal immigrants. Such illicit tactics also raise the specter that the government might use its hold over the nation’s electoral commission to cheat if the opposition somehow prevails at the polls.
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After the Soviet Union disintegrated and lost its hold over vassal states in Central Europe, the fates of countries that were formerly under Moscow’s control diverged. Some, such as Belarus, became brutal dictatorships. Others, including both Poland and Hungary, seemed to be on a path to sustaining genuinely free societies.
Three decades later, those assumptions look unduly optimistic. The dream of a successful transition from communism to democracy remains alive in Warsaw, and elsewhere in Central Europe, but whether these countries can withstand the trend toward authoritarianism is now, tragically, very much in doubt.