DEMOCRATIC RENEWAL IN POLAND
The 2023 Parliamentary Elections
Photo courtesy of Ellen Hinsey
NER international correspondent Ellen Hinsey reports from Warsaw on the 2023 Polish parliamentary elections.
Poland’s October 15, 2023, parliamentary elections were an impressive reflection of the resilience of the country’s democracy. The last eight years under the Law and Justice party have seen the step-by-step dismantlement of the independence of Poland’s judiciary, including both its Constitutional and Supreme Courts. These attacks were accompanied by strict government control over the country’s public television stations TVP1, TVP2, and TV Info and, later, its regional press in a bid to “re-Polonize” it. Immediately following the 2023 elections this government bias led even Marcin Wolski—former director of TVP2—to admit that, under Law and Justice, the station had created “worse propaganda than [under communism] in the 1970s.”[1] On the eve of the elections it appeared PiS had indeed made good on party leader Jarosław Kaczyński’s 2015 promise to “Bring Budapest to Warsaw.”
And in the lead-up to the elections these developments appeared to be reaching a crescendo. To support Law and Justice’s electoral campaign, Poland’s public television was instrumentalized in full. In mid-August the party chose as its central campaign theme the dangers of immigration—just as Viktor Orbán had done for Hungary’s 2022 parliamentary elections. Virulent attacks on Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk and fear-mongering TV and YouTube spots were run at an impressive rate of repetition, or with what central European commentator János Széky has called “firehose” intensity. These ads, often misleading in their sequencing and the origin of their images, flashed up clips of Poland’s border wall with Belarus, intercut with scenes of migrants arriving en masse in Lampedusa or sequences from recent riots in France. Viewed as one of the country’s most brutal elections, this profoundly negative campaign was carried out under Law and Justice’s global electoral slogan “A Safe Poland.”
This domination of the public media landscape by Law and Justice led many to wonder whether, given the means at Law and Justice’s disposal, the illiberal system could be overturned at all. These concerns had been raised already in spring 2023 when—contrary to European standards—less than six months before the election, Law and Justice had made changes to the country’s Electoral Law. These notably included legislated voter busing in rural areas—traditionally PiS’s electoral strongholds—and the requirement that all overseas votes be counted and submitted to the National Electoral Commission within twenty-four hours after the polls closed or else be considered invalid. This was a task that even Łukasz Jasina, the spokesman for Poland’s foreign ministry, openly admitted to be a near impossibility[2]. As a result, Polish election committees abroad would stay awake and work for over thirty-eight hours to ensure that all cast ballots were counted.
In August 2023, Law and Justice also passed an amendment allowing the country to hold a referendum concurrent with the parliamentary elections—again, in line with the 2022 parliamentary elections in Hungary. These two referenda—neither of which garnered enough votes to be considered binding—are nevertheless highly noteworthy for their strategic use as an illiberal election tool. While plebiscites and the like are not new to populists, both the Polish and Hungarian referenda contained four highly-biased questions that—rather than presenting any clear actionable matters “of particular importance to the State”—baldly reiterated criticisms of the opposition and were thinly veiled propaganda. For both these “dissuasive referenda,” voters were encouraged by government-controlled media to vote “no” on all questions, although their ratification seemed of secondary importance.
Since the consolidation of the modern Polish state in the 1920s, no other referendum has presented exclusively “negative” questions. Further, in the days prior to the election, it was widely reported that voters had to openly declare to polling station staff if they intended to refuse to take the referendum ballot. Neither was it possible—being state property—to destroy the referendum ballot. This effectively meant that voters were forced to either publicly reveal their preferences or be obliged to carry the referendum with them into the voting booth. As is clear, the referendum created conditions that threatened one of the pillars of democracy: a citizen’s right to a secret ballot and the prohibition of propaganda in the privacy of the voting booth. As with the twenty-four-hour limit for the counting of overseas votes, the Poles found ways to circumvent the referendum, and it failed to meet the required 50 percent threshold for ratification.
But the purpose of the referendum was highly consequential in yet another way: while Poland’s Electoral Code establishes a cap for party campaign financing, there are no such limits on government spending and donations for referenda. This loophole allowed Law and Justice to blur the lines between campaigning and state publicity for its referendum, creating not just a firehose, but a tornado of media. In its post-election report this led the OSCE (the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) to state that, while the Polish elections were free, they could not be considered fair due to the government’s “clear advantage” in terms of media dominance. It was also suggested that PiS had used the referendum as a “deliberate means of bypassing election campaign finance regulations,” thus negatively affecting the “transparency and accountability” of the election. In the face of such overwhelming tactics—what happened in Poland on October 15, 2023?
Photo courtesy of Ellen Hinsey
When the Polish National Electoral Commission published its final tally, the electoral turnout in Poland was, by any standards, extraordinary: 74.3 percent of the nation’s registered voters cast a ballot, a figure that rose to an astounding 84.9 percent in Warsaw. Numbers like that are often believed to be unattainable in contemporary elections. But—as was the case under communism—Polish society showed itself capable of unexpected things. And on Monday October 16, with final votes in, the coalition of Polish opposition parties—despite the immense illiberal challenge—had overturned Law and Justice’s parliamentary majority.
Unsurprisingly now perhaps, in the days following the election, the Polish weekly Polityka revealed that allegedly much inspiration for Law and Justice’s campaign—a near a carbon copy of Hungary’s 2022 election strategy—had indeed been, starting in mid-August 2023, the result of close collaboration between PiS and Hungarian advisors from Orbán’s circle.[3]According to Polityka, PiS’s Hungarian colleagues had apparently claimed that “all Law and Justice had to do was translate what had worked” to secure Fidesz’s 2022 re-election and PiS would win: a recipe of stoking fears of immigrants, virulent attacks on the opposition, and a “negative” referendum.
In the end Poland showed itself, however, capable of resisting the illiberal challenge. Firstly, Donald Tusk’s Coalition chose to affirm the possibility of a positive Poland. This was a message that the electorate was ready and eager to hear. In language reminiscent of Václav Havel, the late dissident and president of Czechoslovakia, Tusk spoke at rallies about how “love will win” and the coalition’s logo, a simple red heart, also recalled Havel’s trademark. Tusk might well have also adopted the Czechs’ shaking of their keys at rallies in 1989, which signified “show the communists the door.” That said, while Tusk’s campaign was a success, the Polish democratic awakening did not happen overnight, nor was it the work of a single man or party.
Overlooked by most post-election commentary is how, over the last eight years, segments of Polish civil society determinedly fought the country’s growing illiberalism, often with inventiveness and humor. To name just a few initiatives, in 2015, in response to Law and Justice’s attack on Poland’s Constitutional Court, civil society activists established the Komitet Obrony Demokracji (Committee for the Defense of Democracy or KOD). At its height, in 2016 the KOD brought a quarter of a million people into the streets to protest threats to Poland’s democracy.
In the tradition of Solidarity, the KOD also established nationwide education and information networks, later critical to groups such as Women’s Strike, which protested changes to Poland’s abortion laws. These in turn were precursors to the “Constitutional Tour” bus, the brainchild of Robert Hojda, which crisscrossed Poland teaching citizens about their constitutional rights. The legal groups “Free Courts” and “Lex Super Omnia” stood by rule of law and the Civic Election Oversight project (Obywatelska Kontrola Wyborów) monitored elections. As Magda Szyc, an activist remarked, “The KOD and other similar grassroots organizations are in large part responsible for the results of the present elections. This would not have happened without the ongoing democratic will and hopes of many Polish people.”
Now Donald Tusk’s Coalition and its parliamentary allies will face the task of undoing eight years of illiberal governance—a formidable undertaking for which there is no roadmap. But one has reason to believe that Poland—ever a laboratory of democracy—will face this with the same determination it did with its experience of illiberalism. In short, Poland is not to be underestimated.
[1] https://notesfrompoland.com/2023/10/18/we-made-propaganda-worse-than-under-communism-admits-polish-state-tv-star-after-election-failure/n
[2] https://notesfrompoland.com/2023/10/13/some-overseas-votes-certain-not-to-be-counted-in-time-says-foreign-ministry-spokesman/
[3] https://www.polityka.pl/tygodnikpolityka/kraj/2231806,1,jak-doradcy-orbna-pomogli-pis-przegrac-wybory-i-kto-ich-sprowadzil.read