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The governing coalition should finally make work of hammering out a real alternative to PiS’ illiberalism with concrete policies rather than just upholding a “but at least we’re not PiS” image, Tom Junes writes.
On 15 October last year, many observers sighed in relief as the outcome of Poland’s parliamentary elections became clear.
After eight years of so-called illiberal politics and democratic backsliding under governments led by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, the pendulum was about to swing back towards liberal democracy.
In an election that saw record turnout, Jarosław Kaczyński’s PiS-led United Right coalition still managed to come out on top in the polls but failed to get a majority. Instead, a diverse coalition of conservative, liberal and left parties managed to cobble together a government led by former PM and former President of the European Council Donald Tusk.
Tusk is also the long-time leader of the Civic Platform (PO) and Kaczyński’s de facto nemesis. So hopes were high that the current government, dubbed the 15 October coalition, would make work of undoing the perceived damage of PiS’ policies and restore Poland’s standing abroad.
Now a year later, one cannot but admit that the results so far are at best a mixed bag and at worst a severe disappointment that only underscores the haplessness of the anti-PiS opposition of the past years.
To make matters worse, the most recent polling suggests that the governing coalition would lose its majority, paving the way for PiS to return to government after the next elections in a likely alliance with the far-right Konfederacja.
We’ve been here before
Seen against the backdrop of a potential Trump victory in the United States, PiS’ ouster from power certainly hasn’t constituted a turning point or even a watershed development in the political trajectory of the region where the illiberal politics of Slovakia’s Robert Fico and Hungary’s Viktor Orban still hold strong, and the far right has made inroads into mainstream politics all around Europe.
More so, we’ve been here before. Poland’s politics have been dominated for the past two decades by the PO-PiS “duopoly” personified by a never-ending Manichean struggle between Tusk and Kaczyński in which the pendulum ultimately will swing the other way.
But there is more at stake now. Instead of undoing or mitigating PiS’ policies, the 15 October coalition has seemingly decided to leave them unchanged or even emulate PiS.
Though in its foreign relations the current government has admittedly managed to shore up its image as a “defender of the free world” — with foreign minister Radek Sikorski lecturing US Republicans on Russia in Washington and Tusk mitigating the fallout of PiS’s rule-of-law infringements in Brussels — recently, Tusk himself unleashed a storm by announcing a suspension of the right to asylum in Poland which goes not only against the EU’s values but also conflicts with the Polish constitution.
Having criticised PiS for being soft on immigration, Tusk now seemingly wants to outflank Europe’s anti-immigrant far right by closing off Poland’s already militarised border and getting tougher than anybody else on immigration even if this means ignoring basic human rights.
The 15 October coalition has also blatantly failed to reverse or change PiS’ draconian abortion law, an issue that provoked the largest mass protests in Poland since the demise of communism and was a crucial factor in ousting PiS.
Despite the latter, the conservatives in the 15 October coalition have managed to impede any meaningful progress on the matter.
History as a propaganda tool
The current government also seems to have embraced PiS’ instrumentalisation of history as propaganda. It has actually increased the budget of the country’s flagship Institute of National Remembrance, which is still led by PiS-appointee and rumoured presidential candidate for PiS, Grzegorz Nawrocki.
But it is not only the conservatives and liberals in the coalition that are emulating PiS. The Ministry of Higher Education is run by the coalition’s junior partner on the left and it too is increasingly showing similarities with its PiS-run predecessor by aiming to enact a new higher education law that cuts academic autonomy and makes funding more dependent on political favoritism.
The planned law effectively looks like it was simply copied from the playbook of PiS’ firebrand higher education minister Przemysław Czarnek. If such a law would indeed materialise and PiS returns to power, then the latter will have no impediment to purge universities and the Academy of Sciences as it sees fit.
While some might see these moves by the governing coalition as an attempt to poach potential PiS voters in light of the upcoming presidential elections — elections that are crucial since the PiS-backed incumbent Andrzej Duda can veto any legislation put forward by the current majority at will — it is a questionable strategy since the past decades in Europe have time and time again shown that emulating the radical and far right only ends up benefitting the radical and far right.
Instead, the governing coalition should finally make work of hammering out a real alternative to PiS’ illiberalism with concrete policies rather than just upholding a “but at least we’re not PiS” image.
Because, ultimately, with liberals who are not prepared to uphold the values of liberal democracy one doesn’t even need illiberals to end up with illiberal policies.
Tom Junes is a historian and Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is the author of “Student Politics in Communist Poland: Generations of Consent and Dissent”.
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