What on earth is happening in Poland?
IN THE RUN-UP to Poland’s election in October 2023 Donald Tusk, the leader of the country’s centre-right bloc, said that if he regained power he would need just 24 hours to begin restoring democracy. After the vote Mr Tusk, who was prime minister from 2007 to 2014, formed a coalition that drove the populist incumbents, the Law and Justice party (PiS), from power.
On December 13th Mr Tusk was inaugurated and his government got straight to work. But in doing so it has picked fights with the courts and the president, Andrzej Duda, an ally of the ousted government. PiS accuses Mr Tusk of trampling the constitution. Legal experts have also questioned the new prime minister’s tactics. Rival interpretations of the law have divided public institutions. This fight is a test of how easily a centrist government can restore norms that have been bulldozed by a populist one. How is it going?
It began with the state media. On December 20th Poland’s state television channel, little more than a propaganda outfit for PiS, was abruptly taken off the air. PiS politicians and journalists at the broadcaster started a sit-in protest. Mr Duda claimed the government was acting illegally and refused to sign a bill extending funding for public media.
In response Mr Tusk’s government put the state press-agency, TV and radio companies into insolvency. The process allowed it to dismiss their PiS-appointed managers, bypassing the National Media Council—a regulator created by PiS in 2016, which it stacked in its favour. Mr Tusk’s government argues that the creation of the council was illegal. But a court later refused to register the liquidations of the state broadcasters; officials are expected to appeal.
More clashes with the country’s justices followed. On January 15th Adam Bodnar, the new justice minister, replaced the national prosecutor, arguing that his appointment in 2022 had breached regulations. The constitutional court, stacked with PiS loyalists, ordered the new appointment to be paused while it ruled on its legality. Mr Bodnar insists that the justices’ order was “defective”. The split between the executive and the highest court creates worrying legal ambiguity.
The new administration is confronting Mr Duda directly, too. On January 9th police marched into the presidential palace to arrest two former PiS ministers, Mariusz Kaminski and Maciej Wasik, who had taken refuge there. In 2015, while the pair were leading Poland’s anti-corruption efforts, they were convicted of abusing power. Mr Duda said he pardoned them years ago—but Polish justices said he had jumped the gun by acting before a final ruling on the ministers’ case, rendering the pardons invalid. After their recent arrest Mr Kaminski and Mr Wasik went on hunger strike in jail before the president eventually pardoned them again.
PiS is outraged by Mr Tusk’s tactics. On January 11th the party brought tens of thousands of protesters to the streets. Yet Mr Tusk’s coalition argues that its aggressive approach is necessary to restore the rule of law after eight years of PiS rewriting the rules governing state institutions to entrench their supporters. The alternative, it says, would be to allow the appointees to serve out their terms and for democratic decay to continue. “PiS created a minefield, which Mr Tusk now has to navigate,” says Wojciech Szacki, political commentator at Polityka Insight, a think-tank in Warsaw. “Some mines will inevitably go off.” But sidestepping established processes, even when the goal is to depoliticise and fix public institutions, creates a dangerous precedent of unchecked majoritarian rule in Poland.
For all the mess, Mr Tusk’s strategy at least looks politically savvy. His decisiveness has delighted many of his voters. The parties in his coalition have risen in polls at the expense of PiS. The European Union is considering unfreezing covid-19 recovery funds, which it had withheld for years over rule-of-law concerns under PiS. (Mr Tusk is well connected in Brussels, having served as president of the European Council between 2014 and 2019).
Moreover, cleaning up after PiS is one of the few things that Mr Tusk’s sprawling coalition can agree on. His cabinet, which yokes together the radical left and conservative right, will struggle to formulate a positive agenda for Poland. It is already jostling over a bill to re-liberalise abortion after PiS tightened access in 2021.
All this means that the government is unlikely to slow its efforts to undo its predecessors’ legacy. PiS will probably lose further ground in local and European elections this year. Its protests are thus unlikely to come to much, says Mr Szacki. He now expects the government to begin pruning PiS loyalists from the constitutional court. “It is Mr Tusk’s turn in power now.” ■