A year before Boris Johnson’s Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, a little-known rightwing populist party won power again in Poland – using all the tricks that would become so familiar. It accused its political opponents of being enemies of the people; it would make Poland great again by restoring traditional virtues; it would resist the EU even though it was a member; and it would be unremittingly hostile to migrants and gays. At the time, it seemed a one-shot idiosyncrasy, but the Law and Justice party soon emerged as one of the leaders in Europe’s apparently irresistible drive to the right.
It won a second election in 2019 and began to menace Poland’s hard-won post-communist freedoms. A stooge was already president, but now more stooges took over public television, ran the central bank but, most important of all, followed up the 2017 purge of the supreme court to take even more control of the judiciary. The party was using presidential decree, backed by puppet judges, to run Poland, not only hugely restricting abortion rights – sidestepping parliament – but trying to blacklist political opponents from public office.
Street protests in Warsaw this June, followed by the EU launching infringement proceedings for violating its treaty commitments, forced it to back off the blacklisting proposal that was aimed squarely at Donald Tusk, leader of the opposition Civic Coalition. But in last Sunday’s Polish general election, its aim in a third term was to bring the proposal back. It would consolidate its authoritarian power and turn Poland into a de facto one-party state run on traditional Catholic lines. The standoff with the EU, which had withheld €36bn of Covid recovery funding as part of its proceedings, would deepen. Law and Justice had no intention of complying with any EU founding principle it disliked.
But amazingly, despite unremitting propaganda from the state-run TV outdoing anything George Orwell could imagine, Poland’s people – especially its young and its women – roused themselves to say no. Law and Justice lost control of both houses of the Polish parliament.
It is a stirring moment for Poland and for Europe. The increasingly settled view of the new British right is that its route to power is a British-style version of Law and Justice. Thus, Britain should withdraw from the European court of human rights, continue its hostility to the EU, be poisonous to migrants, wage war on “lefty lawyers” and “woke” preoccupations with trans and LGBTQ+ rights, character-assassinate political opponents and offer tax cuts as bribes.
It is Suella Braverman, Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson who speak for the people, just as Law and Justice did in Poland. But actually they don’t. People understand that demonising political opponents is no way to run a democracy. They do care about being told the truth, and value their public service broadcaster that tries to do that. They don’t damn all lawyers as lefty but see them as essential to the rule of law. Independent judges are never the enemy of the people.
They may want to resist mass immigration, but equally they understand migrants are human beings. They also understand that standing by human rights and liberties entrenched by a liberal constitution are better than any alternative, especially one-party rule. A minority will always buy the Braverman line that wants to trash those principles, but the majority do not. What was stirring about last Sunday was that Poland, a nation that had lived under communist oppression, was not going to surrender to a rightwing version of the same.
Poles rallied to the opposition parties. In London, there were at least 40 polling stations, with more in all of Britain’s big cities: one Polish friend told me people waited up to two hours to vote. In Warsaw, some queues stretched for more than six hours, extending well beyond the closing time. The overall turnout was more than 74%, even higher than the turnout in the June 1989 general election that broke with communism. And while in London, despite Law and Justice decreeing that all votes cast outside Poland would be directed to constituencies in liberal Warsaw, where the votes for the opposition would pile up uselessly, it was still worthwhile voting. In Warsaw, citizens registered to vote outside the capital in rightwing towns and villages in the east, secure that the overseas vote would compensate for their lost Warsaw vote. The majority was spontaneously speaking as one. It was inspiring.
Trouble lies ahead. The stooges still control the power centres outside parliament. Law and Justice is trying to detach MPs from the opposition bloc to support it, so that Poland’s tame president can reasonably ask it – still the largest minority party – to try to form a government. Even if Tusk does become prime minister, the president, Andrzej Duda, can veto his laws. Trying to unravel the Law and Justice state and win the release of that crucial €36bn from the EU will be contested at every turn.
Yet a Rubicon has been crossed. Poland’s big cities and its prosperous west want to protect its democracy, are strongly pro-Ukraine and pro-EU as a guarantor of both liberty and prosperity. Importantly, a lot of Polish voters backed the pro-EU opposition, influenced by their desire not to repeat the disaster of Brexit, which has become an awesome warning across Europe. At least Brexit has served one good purpose. The Catholic church, which at first backed Law and Justice, is worried: attendance is collapsing. It is the pro-democracy Dominican churches, always more rooted with the people, that are building congregations even in the rural traditional Polish east. This is not unnoticed in the Vatican. Catholicism always loses when it becomes coterminous with reaction.
It is in Poland’s and Europe’s interest that Poland, one of Europe’s big six states, establishes itself as a bulwark of liberal democracy. It would be good not only in its own right, but as an example to other east European states of what they can be. The EU took flak from the brigade of Eurosceptics for the stand it struck on Poland, but it was right – now backed by the Polish majority.
It was one more reminder that the EU is a force for good on our continent and those who oppose it a force for bad. But more importantly, it showed that people value their democracy and all that buttresses it. Thank you, Poland.
• Will Hutton is an Observer columnist
