Will Poland turn away from fake democracy?
Polish voters can show the world tomorrow that there is a way back
The new cold war is not between countries but within them—between two organizing principles that cannot possibly get along. On one side are liberal democrats—covering the broad range from presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama to senators like the deceased John McCain and the retiring Mitt Romney—and on the other are populist autocrats whose dream is turning real democracies into fake ones, generally for personal benefit.
Former President Donald Trump has his equivalents all around the world—from Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey to Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Viktor Orban in Hungary. But a place of honor is reserved for Jaroslaw Kaczynski (ka-CHIN-ski), who should be uppermost in our minds at the moment.
That’s because his ruling Law and Justice Party, a founding member of the global democracy wrecking crew, is up for reelection on Oct. 15. And if the party should fail to get a majority in the Sejm, Poland’s powerful lower house of parliament, it would be an important victory for the forces of progress on Earth.
It should never have been this hard. I remember, as a young foreign correspondent, running all over the former Communist world in the years that following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. So spectacular was the failure of communism that there seemed to be no discussion at the time that the Western model would prevail. This idea was encapsulated in Francis Fukuyama’s famous “End of History” theory.
The capitalism part of the Western model was indeed adopted widely, though in problematic ways; currency collapses and corrupt privatizations in many places created bitterness that undermined the second part: liberal democracy. Populists selling snake oil, tribalism, and nostalgic national mythologies arose.
And that is where we meet Kaczynski, who founded Law and Justice (known by the Polish acronym PiS) 22 years ago with his twin brother Lech (killed in a plane crash in 2010). Much like the invention of the National Peasant Party in Romania—a country I called home for some years—the creation of PiS was a play for the salt of the earth, pointing their disdain against “elites.” Years later, the American Republicans would try the same agitations.
So, my feeling is that Kaczynski has never fully received the credit for his stellar accomplishments in derailing Polish democracy, even within his own camp.
Within this circle, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s iron grip was often held up as the gold standard of repression. This was never quite right.
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