Poland’s Opposition Is Failing to Turn the Right-Wing Tide
This month, Poland’s liberal opposition mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to protest the ruling party’s attacks on the rule of law. But it’s less clear that it’s winning over the government’s supporters, who remain wedded to its social programs.
Donald Tusk delivers a speech during a march organized by Civil Platform on June 4, 2023 in Warsaw, Poland. (Omar Marques / Getty Images)
On June 4, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Warsaw to protest the destruction of democratic institutions. Denouncing the record of the national-conservative party that has been in power since 2015, it was Poland’s largest single protest since the women’s demonstration against the de facto ban on abortion in fall 2020. So, with parliamentary elections due by November, is this a breakthrough in Polish politics? Not exactly.
The Warsaw march responded to the call of Donald Tusk, prime minister from 2007 to 2014, a veteran European official, and today chairman of the largest liberal opposition party, Civic Platform (PO). Although the march was officially supported by other opposition parties, from the center-right Third Road coalition to the social democrats of the New Left, Tusk was widely perceived as the main figure behind it. The ideological face of the demonstration was similarly defined: the politicians who spoke focused exclusively on threatened democratic norms and the need to restore the rule of law in Poland. To this end they drew parallels between the right-wing, Catholic authoritarianism of today’s ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) and Poland’s pre-1989 “actually existing socialism.”
These are hazardous comparisons, to say the least, given the social and economic structure of today’s Poland and the one before 1989. Yet it is true that PiS has been undermining the rule of law in Poland since its first year in power. Back in 2015, PiS violated the procedure for electing the Constitutional Court in order to secure a majority of judges openly sympathizing with the government. In 2016, it controversially merged the posts of minister of justice and prosecutor general, making the prosecution — the opponents of the government claim — a politicized institution. In the next step, the government introduced two new judicial chambers to the Supreme Court. One of them, the Disciplinary Chamber, has been packed with former prosecutors loyal to Zbigniew Ziobro, the present justice minister and prosecutor general, with a more or less clear intention to monitor the judges and, potentially, suspend those who do not work according to the government’s wishes.
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