Adam Bodnar, Poland’s new justice minister, recently explained to me the immense challenge of rebuilding liberal democracy in his country after an eight-year slide toward authoritarianism. Imagine, he said, that Donald Trump had won the last election and been in power for two terms instead of one. “What would be the damage?” he asked.
After only four years of Trump, President Biden inherited a furiously divided nation, its courts seeded with right-wing apparatchiks and the nature of reality itself in deep dispute. But as even MAGA die-hards will acknowledge, Trump often failed to bend the state to his will, which is why his allies have a plan to do things differently next time, purging civil servants and replacing them with loyalists. Poland is a country that has just gone through something like what Trumpists hope to impose on us in a second term. Its institutions have been hollowed out. Many experienced technocrats and neutral judges have been replaced by lackeys and ideologues.
And now it’s trying to repair itself, which is why I flew there last month. In a world where liberal values seem to be in retreat almost everywhere, Poland is a rare bright spot, a place where voters — especially women and young people — rebelled against a punishing religious nationalism to demand the restoration of their rights. The parallels to the backlash against the American Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, were impossible to miss. But while being in Warsaw was inspiring, it was also sobering, because it quickly became clear to me just how complicated it is to fix a modern democracy that’s been systematically undermined, a lesson we might someday have to learn in America. Poland, said the Harvard professor Daniel Ziblatt, a coauthor of the 2018 best seller “How Democracies Die,” is “a good news story about how electoral authoritarianism can be dislodged, and then the limits of what happens next.”
When I met Bodnar, a widely admired legal scholar in his late 40s, Poland’s new administration, led by the centrist, pro-European Prime Minister Donald Tusk, had been in office for just over a month. The previous government, the deeply Catholic, reactionary Law and Justice Party, had ruled since 2015, coming to power as part of the same populist wave that brought the world Brexit and Trump. In the October election, Law and Justice used various maneuvers to tilt the electoral playing field in its favor; a month before it took place, the German Marshall Fund declared that the upcoming Polish vote “will not be fair.” But a stunning level of voter turnout — over 74 percent — overcame the ruling party’s advantages. Young people flooded the polls; according to exit surveys, those under 30 voted at higher rates than those 60 and older. It was a victory so momentous that liberal Poles kept comparing it to 1989, when the democratic Solidarity movement triumphed over communism. Law and Justice delayed the transition to a new government until December, but it could not prevent it.
For Poland’s democrats, the election was “our last attempt to push back against us going to the Budapest direction,” said Aleksandra Wisniewska, a newly elected member of parliament, referring to the more entrenched autocracy in Hungary, which Law and Justice openly emulated. Wisniewska herself represents a new spirit in Polish politics; a former humanitarian aid worker and the daughter of an immigrant from Thailand, she made issues like women’s rights and democracy central to her campaign. Now, at 29, she’s the youngest woman in Poland’s Sejm, parliament’s lower house, and the only person of color.
But while there was still a fair amount of ebullience among the winning coalition, there was also a somber awareness of everything that the former ruling party had done to make its power democracy-proof. Over its eight years in office, Law and Justice undermined judicial independence, persecuting judges who defied the government and using extralegal maneuvers to stack courts with its partisans. It had turned Polish public media into a font of rancid and hysterical agitprop that made Fox News look actually fair and balanced; one public radio station was widely condemned for releasing information about the teenage son of an opposition politician, who later committed suicide. In state-owned companies, competent administrators were replaced with regime supporters, who in turn helped fund Law and Justice campaigns.
The new coalition government has a mandate to rehabilitate those institutions, but the former rulers aren’t ceding control willingly, and often there’s no consensus about who has the authority to settle conflicts related to the transition. For Poland’s new leadership, roadblocks to reform are everywhere. “I try to find different loopholes, niches in the legal system, that will give me the chance for making changes, really material changes in the in how the system operates, without breaking the law,” said Bodnar. But where there’s disagreement about what the law is, the new government is erring on the side of action. In seeking to root out the legacy of the former government, Tusk has said he’s using an “iron broom.” This approach has elicited howls of protest from the Polish right and some of its MAGA supporters in America, but after so many years of Law and Justice’s systematic civic vandalism, it’s the only way forward.
Of all the lessons Poland holds for the United States, perhaps most germane to American politics is the role that public revulsion toward a far-reaching abortion ban played in saving Polish democracy. Zuzanna Rudzinska-Bluszcz, the deputy minister of justice, told me that the election was about “security and abortion.” Poland has restricted abortion since 1993, but until 2020, the law included an exception for severe and irreversible fetal defects. Eliminating that exception was a longtime project of Law and Justice, whose leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said in 2016 that his party would “strive to ensure that even very difficult pregnancies, when the child is condemned to death, is severely deformed, will end in birth, so that the child can be christened, buried, given a name.” Kaczynski and his allies were unable to do this legislatively, but after they transformed the constitutional tribunal, it banned such abortions by judicial fiat, a move Bodnar described to me as “the Polish Dobbs.”
The 2020 ruling set off the largest protests since the fall of communism, which in turn were met with a violent crackdown by authorities, as well as attacks from right-wing counterdemonstrators. Like the American Women’s March in 2017, these protests brought many young people into the political process for the first time. “That mobilized the very young generation that’s very politicized today,” the feminist activist and protest organizer Klementyna Suchanow told me. Liberal activists had been trying for years to raise popular awareness about the destruction of the rule of law. As the legal scholar Aleksandra Gliszczynska-Grabias explained, a group of judges targeted by the regime for their independence traveled around the country, spreading the message that “without free courts, there will be no freedom at all. No free culture. No freedom of speech. And in the end, there will be no free citizens.” The judges even held workshops at rock festivals to reach young people. But the independence of the legal system is generally too abstract a concern to build a broad-based national coalition around. The cruelty of the abortion ban, and the iniquitous way it was enacted, made the issue concrete.
“I think this was the moment when people understood,” said Gliszczynska-Grabias. “Even in the smallest cities, where my parents live, where there were literally no protests for the last 20 years,” suddenly, there were “hundreds of women on the streets.”
As in the United States, the abortion ban created enormous suffering for pregnant women facing medical catastrophe. According to Human Rights Watch, at least six women died after being denied abortions during medical emergencies. Authorities had begun interrogating women who’d had miscarriages. In one high-profile case, an artist named Joanna was reported by her own psychologist after taking abortion pills she’d ordered from abroad, even though it’s only a crime to provide the pills, not to use them oneself. Police officers strip-searched her while she was still bleeding. When she spoke out about her ordeal, government-controlled media smeared her as unstable.
That was just months after Justyna Wydrzynska, a co-founder of the Abortion Dream Team, an activist group that helps women access medical abortions, was convicted of a crime for mailing pills to a woman who said her abusive husband wouldn’t let her leave the country. (She faced up to three years in prison, but was ultimately sentenced to eight months of community service.) Natalia Broniarczyk, Wydrzynska’s colleague on the Abortion Dream Team, believes Law and Justice was trying to shore up its own voters ahead of the election. “They, in my opinion, attacked Justyna and took her in front of the court because they wanted to have a victory,” said Broniarczyk. She notes that the judge who handed down the verdict was promoted the very same day.
Back in 2021, when the reproductive rights protests died down, Suchanow said there was a widespread sense of despair in feminist circles, as if it had all been in vain. No one knew if the energy that had been unleashed would translate into votes two years later. “So it was crucial that people didn’t forget how they were humiliated, how their rights were violated on the streets, and they mobilized around the elections,” she said. “And now it’s clear for us that abortion decided the results of the election.” It’s clear to others, too: The former Law and Justice Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has said that pushing for the 2020 abortion ban was a mistake.
The Biden administration is clearly hoping that abortion will play a similar role in American politics. “The president’s aides plan to couple a direct assault on Mr. Trump with a heavy focus on abortion rights, casting the issue as symbolic of larger conservative efforts to restrict personal freedoms,” The New York Times reported last week. Of course, there’s no guarantee that this will work. Poland does, however, illustrate how it can work. An abortion ban, passed in the teeth of popular opposition, demonstrates in the most visceral possible way what it means to be stripped of self-determination. It’s an insult to dignity and a threat to personal safety that can activate people not ordinarily interested in politics. Hungary’s Viktor Orban seems to understand this as well as anyone; his government talks incessantly about traditional values and demonizes sexual minorities, but has done relatively little to restrict abortion access. That’s not the only reason that he’s still in power and Law and Justice is not, but it’s likely one of them.
Now that it’s won, however, Tusk’s administration has to confront all the obstacles Law and Justice has erected to stop it from governing. Some of the ways the party is pushing back against Tusk are perfectly normal and appropriate, including the use of checks and balances. Poland still has a Law and Justice-aligned president, Andrzej Duda, whose term ends next year, and he’s expected to veto many of the new government’s initiatives. That’s one reason that, despite the election results, comprehensive abortion liberalization will almost certainly have to wait, forcing the new government to rely on smaller steps to expand reproductive rights, like making the morning-after pill available without a prescription. But Tusk’s government also must contend with institutions that Law and Justice refashioned, using dubious legal means, into instruments of its power, particularly the courts. And that’s where things get complicated.
While in power, Law and Justice pursued a brutally effective strategy for seizing control of the country’s courts, including its constitutional tribunal. As the pro-democracy organization Freedom House wrote, it had three main components: “First, to deny opposition-appointed judges from taking their place on the court. Second, to pass laws designed to paralyze the court and prevent it from functioning effectively. Third, to force through the appointment of judges loyal to the ruling party. All this was done in open defiance of the law, the constitution, and multiple rulings issued by the Tribunal itself.” The European Court of Human Rights, whose rulings are binding on Poland, has found that, because of irregularities in the ways justices were appointed, the constitutional court can’t be considered “a tribunal established by law.”
With the court’s very validity in dispute, constitutional crisis was inevitable. One of Tusk’s priorities has been to fix Poland’s public media, which, under Law and Justice, was not just wildly propagandistic but, according to Bodnar, also corrupt. “One of the most important issues for me is that it was not just an enterprise for making changes in Poland, but also just to take personal financial advantage,” said Bodnar. But when the new government fired state media leadership, the constitutional tribunal tried to block it. Tusk’s officials, in turn, have cited European court decisions to argue that the tribunal’s rulings can be disregarded.
Naturally, Law and Justice is now accusing Tusk’s government of lawlessness, and the former ruling party has found allies among American Republicans, with the Ohio senator J.D. Vance calling on Biden to speak out against “Polish government attacks on press freedom.” But even some nonpartisan groups have been troubled by Tusk’s aggressive moves against the strongholds of the old regime. “How Polish Television, Polish Radio and the Polish Press Agency have operated up to now blatantly contradicts what public media should be in a democratic state ruled by law,” the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights said in a statement, but “we cannot but note that the way in which the changes in the public media have begun raises serious legal doubts.”
The problem — and this is not unique to Poland — is that the erosion of Poland’s institutions has left the country without any consensus about who has the power to adjudicate many legal conflicts. “There is no ultimate authority,” Michal Kobosko, the former editor of Polish Newsweek and now a center-right member of the new governing coalition in parliament, told me. “We lost it. They” — meaning Law and Justice — “intentionally, I believe, killed the system.” As a result, Tusk’s government has had to choose between propping up a set of norms that its opponents actively eroded and, well, governing. The Biden administration has faced minor versions of this bind, when, for example, Biden used the Supreme Court’s Trump-era expansion of presidential power to fire Trump-appointed officials like Andrew Saul, the former commissioner of the Social Security Administration, and to push out Michael Pack, the former head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, who attempted to do to Voice of America something like what Law and Justice did to Polish state TV. “The Supreme Court’s embrace of the unitary executive left Biden with two options: unilateral disarmament or hardball politics,” wrote Slate’s Mark Stern. As Poland shows us, the more zealots and autocrats succeed in capturing a system, the more hardball politics are the only kind that are possible.
But Poland also shows us that even when a democracy seems to be on the verge of extinguishing itself, there’s still a road back. Rudzinska-Bluszcz, the deputy justice minister, told me that she’d looked to South America for examples of countries that rebuilt their democracies after years of backsliding, but the histories and cultures of the regions are too different to allow for easy comparisons. Instead, Poland has to create its own model. “In Europe, and especially in Central Eastern Europe, we lead the way of going from illiberalism to again liberal democracy, as we led the way in 1989,” she said. “And I think those elections, in 2023, could constitute the founding myth for my generation, like 1989 constituted the founding myth for the generation of my parents.”
Rafal Milach is a visual artist, photographer and educator based in Poland and a member of Magnum Photos.
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