Evolution or revolution?
The question being asked today in Poland reflects the dilemma of trying to restore liberal democracy after eight years of populist state control.
For example, do we have to break the letter of a specific law to restore the rule of law generally?
The Polish experience will tell us a lot about the future of democracy in the EU Member States.
And it also heralds a dilemma that the United States could find itself with after a second presidency of Donald Trump.
The last few weeks of Polish politics have been dramatic, full of fury and sometimes strange.
Two former ministers of the previous Government of the Law and Justice party (PiS), convicted of falsifying documents when they held public office, take refuge in the palace of the president, their party colleague Andrzej Duda.
While Duda is gathered elsewhere, the police arrest them at the palace and take them to jail.
The president says that they are “political prisoners”, talks about “terrorism of the rule of law” and even makes a comparison with Bereza Kartuska, a notorious concentration camp in Poland in the 1930s.
PiS calls for a demonstration in the snow and displays the iconography of the Solidarity movement that brought freedom to Poland in the 1980s.
PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski says the detained politicians are heroes who should be given top national honours.
Poland's tragic and inspiring past is repeated as a grotesque parody.
The supposed
public service television,
TVP, which for eight years broadcast the most vile, lying and offensive propaganda of the party in power, becomes dependent on the new Government.
They fire those who worked at the chain and declare bankruptcy as a commercial company, but broadcasts resume at full speed.
The new news is much more impartial (I have seen it), but even a jurist who is very critical of PiS says that the measures adopted to achieve this good result are “revolutionary measures.”
Various courts, some with clearly sectarian judges, illegally appointed by the PiS Government, openly contradict each other.
At times, this resembles what the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky called “dual power.”
More and more insults are heard, but the new coalition government led by Donald Tusk, who was Polish Prime Minister from 2007 to 2014 and then presided over the European Council (2014-2019), continues to cleanse the bastions of embedded state power of the PiS with what this formidable politician calls “an iron broom.”
Three different threads are intertwined in this drama.
The most visible is the difficulty of reestablishing the institutions of a liberal democracy, built from scratch starting in 1989 on the ruins of a Soviet-type system and subjected to systematic demolition starting in 2015, when PiS came to power, without that the country would at no time cease to be a member of the European Union.
Kaczynski, like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, made great efforts to maintain the façade of a democratic, pluralistic and rule-based state, in accordance with EU standards.
As another jurist says, there are supposed judges who issue supposed verdicts under supposed laws.
A Potemkin constitutionalism, if you will.
As a consequence, the restoration of liberal democracy is both easier and more difficult than its original creation after the end of communism in 1989. It is easier from an external point of view because, instead of being in the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, dominated by the Kremlin, Poland belongs to NATO and the EU.
The EU not only applauds the efforts of the new Government, but will reward them with what could soon exceed €100 billion in EU funds, withheld for violations of the rule of law committed by the previous Government.
From the internal point of view it is more difficult, because this is not, as in 1989, a one-party dictatorship imposed from the outside, which almost all Poles - including many of the communists in power themselves - agreed that It had to be transformed through a peaceful revolution.
It is rather a mess of the Poles' own making, mostly wrapped up in laws passed by a democratically elected parliamentary majority.
Second, this is a case of hyperpolarization, fake news, and hysteria that is very reminiscent of America today.
Supporters of Kaczynski and Tusk, like the Republicans of the MAGA movement and the left wing of the Democratic Party, live in their own parallel reality and call each other out for violating the rule of law and betraying the nation.
A stable liberal democracy requires a basic social consensus around the legitimacy of key institutions such as Parliament, the presidency, independent courts and a free media.
How can we reinvent a functional liberal democracy if there is no such minimum social consensus?
Finally, we must not downplay the importance of the role of people.
Kaczynski and Tusk have been at the forefront of Polish politics for a quarter of a century and they detest each other.
Kaczynski, a prototypical example of paranoid politics, took to the Parliament rostrum moments after the Tusk government took office and accused the new prime minister of being a “German agent.”
Another fatal component of the current crisis is the country's president.
Duda is weak, vain, easy to convince and usually ends up doing what Kaczynski asks of him.
His own doctoral thesis director describes him as “insecure.”
According to Poland's highly respected first president of the Supreme Court, Adam Strzembosz, the president who is now whimpering for the EU to end the new government's violations of the Constitution has personally violated the Constitution a minimum of 13 times.
Instead of playing the crucial role of a neutral head of state during a difficult political transition, he is becoming even more sectarian, sheltering convicted criminals in the presidential palace and uttering fatuous and hyperbolic lamentations.
The new government says it wants to quickly clean out the Augean stables before turning its attention to Poland's future.
It's very easy to say, but we'll see, especially taking into account the power that Duda has to veto and delay any measure.
If PiS has any political strategy, it is surely to make the chaos and hysteria last as long as possible, in the hope of winning back voters in the local elections in April or the European elections in June.
At the moment nothing indicates that it will happen;
In fact, surveys suggest the opposite.
But it cannot be ruled out.
Otherwise, the greatest difficulty for Tusk and his coalition partners will be to resist the temptation to act like those on the other side and limit themselves to installing loyal people.
They have to rebuild the country in a better way.
It is necessary that, at the end of this term, in 2027, public television is truly more impartial and the courts more independent, that the president is unequivocally above partisanship and that state companies completely distance themselves from sectarianism and that the administration public and security services are truly more independent, not only compared to when PiS ruled, but compared to the time of previous Polish governments, including those of Tusk himself, before the populists came to power.
That is the true test they will have to overcome, the true work of Hercules.
Timothy Garton Ash
is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
His latest book is
Europa: A Personal History
(Taurus).
Translation by
María Luisa Rodríguez Tapia.
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