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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Welcome to the People Power Politics podcast brought to you by cedar, the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham. Hello and welcome to the People Power Politics podcast brought to you by cedar. My name is Tim Horton. I'm a Professor of Comparative and European Politics and a Deputy Director of cedar, and I'm going to be the host for this episode. It is my great pleasure to welcome Stanley, Bill and Ben Stanley. Stanley is professor of Polish Studies at the University of Cambridge. Welcome to the podcast, Stanley.
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C
Thank you.
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B
And Ben is an Associate professor at the center for the Study of Democracy, SWPS University in Warsaw. Welcome to the podcast, Ben.
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Thank you.
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For all of you interested in elections, democracy, accountability and representation, Poland provides much food for thought. We have seen two important elections in the country in the past couple of years. A parliamentary election which led to the removal of the Law and Justice government, and a presidential election earlier this year in which a candidate supported by the Law and Justice Party won. Those two elections can be placed within a wider and deeper story of the fate of democracy in Poland and indeed a broader story about the challenges facing liberal democracy in Europe today. To understand the twists and turns of Polish politics, I am delighted to be joined by Ben and Stan, two scholars who have the advantage both of following the day to day machinations of politics in Poland, but they also have a deep understanding of the country's history, culture and language. So in my very poor Polish to the two of you to this podcast. This podcast is part of our series in which Cedar joins forces with the Journal of Democracy. Other recent podcasts include a discussion between my colleague Nick Cheeseman and Francis Fukuyama, and a discussion between my colleague Licha Cianetti and Rachel Betty Riedleigh, both on their recent articles in Journal of Democracy. And I would encourage all listeners to listen to those too. Stanley and Ben have an article out in July's issue of the Journal of Democracy. It's entitled Democracy After a Warning from Poland. But they also have a new book entitled Good the Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution, which is due out for publication in September this year by Stanford University Press. I should emphasize we are recording this podcast in late July, so so much to talk about. But let me perhaps begin by asking you. Your Journal of Democracy article starts with the October 2023 parliamentary elections. In many respects, this election is a reaction to the eight years of government led by Law and Justice, a party often known by its initials, P.I.S. or PEACE. I'm sure we may end up using that term. So worth mentioning it at the beginning. I think a lot of listeners will have some sense of what the peace government did. You use the term democratic illiberalism in your work as a label for the peace government's actions. But please, could we maybe begin by you giving us three or four of the key elements of what that government did during its two terms in power and why it attracted attention from those concerned by the fate of democracy in Poland.
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C
So, Stan, thanks very much, Tim. Yes. So as you say, this period, which already feels like history, between 2015 and 2023, when the law and justice or peace government was in power, and it began with peace winning the election, the parliamentary election of 2015, with only 38% of the vote, but for various contingent reasons and contingency, is an important part of the whole story that we tell in the book, but also in the article, were able to have an unprecedented majority, the first time a single electoral list had won a majority by itself in Polish elections since 1989. And that was important, and it's important when we compare it now with the fate of the Tusk, the present Tusk coalition government, which is a coalition because it gave peace a great deal of unified power to introduce its agenda. And you asked the question about a few points of what the party did, what it promised, and then what it did under this moniker that we use as the title of our book is the Good Change. That's what peace promised in 2015, a good change which in practice would overthrow what it presented as a monopolistic liberal system of power that had come to dominate all facets of Polish political and social life in an unhealthy and undemocratic way. And therefore they presented themselves as restorers of democracy, which is one of the reasons we use this term democratic illiberalism. And that's very much the way they were received by a lot of voters who, after they came to power, showed in numerous public opinion surveys that their view of the health of Polish democracy was much more positive voters on the whole in Poland than it had been before peace came to power. But I'll focus on Polish very briefly on three main areas of this good change. Now, the first of those, and the one that probably provoked the most controversy both in Poland and abroad, was political and institutional change, political in the sense of political and public institutions. And in response to this notion that these institutions had been monopolized and dominated by a homogeneous liberal block of power before 2015, peace gave itself considerable liberties in taking over those institutions claiming a democratic mandate to do so, and often in the view of critics and many outside, and indeed, one would say, neutral advisors, doing so in contravention of established procedures or even laws. So these included stacking the Constitutional Tribunal, stacking bodies that appoint judges, taking control of public media and turning public media into a propaganda outlet, replacing and appointing loyalists into key positions in the civil service, and so on. So this was, of course, what provoked response in the European Union and elsewhere for damage to the rule of law and the separation of powers. Brought protesters out onto the streets. But they were always presenting this as a change they were making with the democratic mandate to. To rebalance a previously monopolistic and homogeneous system. The second main area is, let's say, in very broad terms, in culture and values. And here we might use a term that's well known in political science today of cultural backlash. So the idea that peace was drawing on concerns in the electorate, of course, amplifying those concerns through its own rhetoric that there was a progressive change in society that was dangerous to Polish tradition, that this change was happening too quickly, and it would be in the familiar culture war issues that we know from many democracies in Western Europe and in the United States of LGBT + rights. Abortion Migration is a very important one. And so peace's position being to bring things back, as they described it, to traditional values, to traditional values based around Roman Catholicism, and to a defense of national culture and the national community from external threats, which might have included LGBT rights, as they described it, or migrants from abroad. And then the third area, and again, it's the same pushback against this established liberal system, as they describe it, monopolistic liberal system is in economic questions and above all, in questions of social policy and redistribution. So here peace presented a picture of a Polish economy that had become more and more unequal, in which elites were benefiting disproportionately from Poland's transition. And that there were neglected areas, particularly in the rural areas where the Peace Party has strong support and in small towns, and that had not benefited to the same degree. And therefore, once again, a rebalancing was required. And peace would deliver this through a range of social policy items, including most famously their flagship child benefit policy of 500 zlotys at the beginning per child. Well, eventually became universal per child. These were very popular policies. They lowered the retirement age that had been previous. Sorry. They raised the retirement age that had been previously lowered by the liberal government of Donald Tusk Trust pre2015 Liberal government. So in these three areas, Peace's Time in government was couched as this revolution that would overthrow this unhealthy, undemocratic liberal domination in those areas. And the Peace government rolled out those policies to, I would say, a very positive reception overall from the electorate. And we can see this very easily in their improved electoral performance in the 2019 elections, where from 38% they went up to 44% of the vote. So even as we discussed in our book, in a situation in which not all voters were enthusiastic about all areas of Peace's change, and there was considerable skepticism even among some Peace voters in that 2019 election about in particular the institutional change, the judicial reform, as they described it. So this sort of stacking of courts and almost a takeover of the judiciary, there was skepticism about that, but that was balanced out and indeed overcome by the positive response of voters to what they seem to perceive as delivering on promises that they had made and improving the lives of everyday poles, which is what the piece government promised. And the electorate seemed to believe that they had delivered on that promise, that inequality had been lowered on various measures, that child poverty had been reduced on various measures. And so this was a very popular government at the time of these 2019 elections. Then Covid came, then Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the energy squeeze in inflation came, and the 2023 elections were a different story.
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B
Thank you very much, Stan. So, actually, you've given us a very good overview of those eight years. And they came to an end, obviously with the 2023 election. So maybe I can turn to Ben and ask. The Peace government was removed thanks to the 2023 elections. This coalition of. Coalition of coalitions involving liberals and leftists and agrarians and some social conservatives, all kind of came together. What do you think was decisive in explaining that election outcome in the autumn of 2023?
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A
Well, I think that above all, what needs to be emphasized about the 2023 elections is that what Peace lost was not so much a plurality as the ability to form a governing coalition. It actually had the largest percentage of votes and only about 2% less than it. Than it had in 2015. So the general image abroad was of this, this illiberal revolution coming to a shuddering halt with a devastating defeat. But this really rather overstates the extent to which Peace lost. Certainly given the. The controversial nature of the. The changes that it. That it brought in during its time in power, it's quite striking just how much of its support it actually managed to preserve such. So I think when trying to understand what happened in 2023, some of the issues that led to peace losing its reputation for competent governance and ability to control the political narrative and make the political weather were important. As Stan has mentioned, the abortion issue, for example, where essentially it pushed the hot potato issue of how to deal with abortion onto its captured constitutional tribunal, which duly ruled that the Poland's abortion law was unconstitutional. That was accompanied by a significant decrease in support for the government, not necessarily because there was a big upswell of people who were suddenly pressing for more liberalization of the abortion law, but because there was a sense that this was a government that had lost control of the narrative that it was trying to shape and had sort of overplayed its hand. So I think that from that point onwards, from the autumn of 2020, and as we saw at the same time, this also accompanied difficulties in dealing with both the first and second waves of COVID and lockdown, that this was an inflection point at which we can start to see the government losing support and opinion polls, but also starting to lose the sense that it was able to control the political agenda without really having to worry about the opposition, and that it was able to do so in such a fashion that its supporters were confident that it was. It was going into the next election knowing what it was doing. I mean, it does need to be emphasized that in many respects, this was. This government was experienced by a lot of Poles as a normal government governing over normal issues. In normal times, the rule of law issues were very prominent to a subset of the population and certainly very prominent abroad. But for a lot of people, the experience of being governed during this period was of being governed by a political party that it got in with lots of ideas about what it wanted to do, managed to achieve several of them, and in doing so sort of underlined its democratic credentials, but ran out of steam essentially sort of halfway through its second term, as it became more and more difficult for it both to do some of the more ambitious things it had set out for itself, but also simply to sort of innovate new ideas. All governments sooner or later, will run out of ideas and run out of inspiration and start to convey the sense to the electorate that they don't really have much more to offer. So part of the reason why it lost, I think, was simply that it had been eight years in power, and there was a perception among some of the more moderate voters, at least, that it was time to give the others their turn in others. Having said that, we also see a significant reaction among certain sections of the population, particularly young voters who were strongly over mobilized compared to previous elections, who were very much motivated by the prospect of getting rid of a government that they saw as fundamentally opposed to their worldview and to their interests. So the election was very much fought by the coalition that is currently governing as an opportunity to push back against the forces of democratic liberalism and to push back against a government that had been responsible for, as they saw it, trashing Poland's reputation at home and abroad. So there were a number of threads that need to be pulled together. But it is worth emphasizing that while much of what was going on in Poland was very. Was very out of the ordinary from the perspective of liberal democratic principles and how Poland's trajectory of liberal democratic development had been viewed up until that point, from the perspective of a lot of Polish voters, not only law and justice supporters, but also supporters of other parties, it was very much a case of politics as usual. And the election result was experienced as such.
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B
I mean, one of the things that I was struck with the 2023 parliamentary elections, they took place very soon after the elections in Slovakia, a country that I follow quite closely and in a particularly challenging environment. I mean, one thing I would say is it's pretty tough for incumbents these days. And actually the 2019-23 period was pretty difficult. We sort of touched on a couple of these things, but I think worth underlining that period embraced a pandemic, Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine, an energy crisis. And both the pandemic and an energy crisis provoked a kind of resultant cost of living crisis. I mean, part of what you've said so far may well go towards answering this question, but maybe I'll ask it more. Expl. In some senses, peace winning 35% of the vote might be a bigger puzzle than the opposition winning, we might suggest. Would you say that, you know, why has peace managed to hang on to its support? Would you say? I mean, Stan, you talk quite a lot about the economic and social policy dimension. You also, of course, mentioned things like the kind of cultural backlash and the cultural agenda. Ben, you mentioned about a government coming into power with a particular agenda and managing and being able to deliver on that agenda. Would you say that those three elements then help explain why? So perhaps a slightly puzzled audience piece managed to still win over a third of the votes in the 2023 elections. Or is there something else that we need to add into the equation? Maybe I'll go to you, Ben, first.
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A
I think that there are two things that stand out in particular here. One is, as you've just mentioned here the question of delivery. This was a government that got into power with some ambiguous, ambitious ideas about what it wanted to do and delivered. Certainly not all of what it wanted to deliver, but delivered on a number of issues that were important and vital to the electorate, such as the child benefits bill that Stan mentioned earlier, or the raising of the retirement age. These were extremely important in the sense that they shifted the center of gravity of economic policy and they were policies that were associated firmly with law and justice. So I think that it, it was able to derive some sort of residual benefit from having been associated with bringing those policies to fruition in the first place. But the second factor that I would mention, and one I think that goes some way to explaining why in particular their core electorate has been so stubbornly persistent, is the extent of polarization in Poland. I mean, polarization is something that we've seen in a number of countries of the region and beyond. And Poland is widely regarded as one of the most politically polarized countries, certainly democratic countries around. And the law and justice electorate has in particular been shaped by this polarization. To the extent that there are a lot of people who vote for law and justice, not necessarily out of ideological conviction so much as intense association with the party itself. I think that certainly that can help explain why the core of their electorate has remained so loyal to the party, but also why they've been able to attract that extra proportion of the electorate that they need to get to where they were in the 2023 election and pretty much where they are now, which is certainly around the 32, 33%. There are more moderate conservative voters who are motivated to vote for law and justice, despite the fact that they may disagree with some of their policies because they see them ultimately as the sort of the anchoring point of the political system, as the most credible governing force on the right. So it's partly because of a very strong core vote that's being cultivated and defined by this, this process of intense effective polarization that we've seen over the last few years. But also because as you this sort of pertains to the argument that I was making earlier. For a lot of people, Law Injustice is still perceived as a relatively normal party that can incorporate right wing and central right interests. So I think in that sense that they've, they've maintained the support that they, they managed to get in 2015 pretty much without having been too strongly affected by the sort of the, the odium of, of the, the rule of law controversies that they engaged in.
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B
So one other aspect that really Struck me in your book is that you talk about things that acted as breaks on peace's power. Things like EU membership, lack of a constitutional majority, those sorts of things. Elsewhere you talk about how the actions of the peace government provoked, galvanized and mobilized the opposition. You've mentioned just now about that as well. You use the term ideological overreach in the Journal of Democracy article when you discuss, for example, the law and justice controlled constitutional tribunals narrowing of Poland's already restrictive abortion laws. Now, not that I would want to give advice to illiberal governments, but part of me wonders if the peace government had done a little less, it might have dampened down the mobilization and might even have managed to kind of stay in power. Of course, the counter argument would be to. To overreach is that you have to make the most of opportunities when you have them. And I know some people hate kind of hypothetical, counterfactual kind of questions. But I just wondered if. Do you think that if the peace government could have remained in power if it had done maybe a little less democratic illiberalism, maybe. I'll throw that in Stan's direction.
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C
Well, that is certainly the view of certain quite important individuals within peace. So, for example, the former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki after the election is on the record suggesting that the abortion ruling might have been a mistake. And it's interesting that you use that phrasing because in theory this was the ruling of an independent court rather than the decision of pieces. Of course we know that the practice was more complex than that, but I think to some degree that is correct. It's a possible hypothetical to entertain. But the problem is that this was not an executive decision entirely being made by Yaroslav Kaczyski in isolation from any external pressures, as an intentional political move. Yaroslav Kaczynski had for many years shied away from the abortion issue, despite pressure from the conservative wings of his own party and of the church that has supported Kim either some parts of the church quite openly and sometimes more tacitly. But he's shied away from this issue in the past because he knew that it was politically dangerous. He knew that although there wasn't a majority of Poland's electorate in favor of liberalization of what was already a very restrictive law, the so called abortion compromise. But that most Poles were happy with the compromise and did not want further restriction of the law. And so he had avoided, despite pressure from parts of his party and the church, any action in this particular area. So first of all the point to make is there was pressure on Kaczynski that caused him to make this move. And the pressure wasn't just from the Church, which was getting louder and louder, including the important constituency of Tadeus Ridzik, who's a Catholic priest, who runs a television and radio network that's quite influential in parts of Peace's base and plays a key mobilizing role. There was starting to be very negative articles in his media about where is our promised change to the abortion law? The message being, we have supported you, now it is time to deliver. That message was getting louder and louder. And then there was almost a kind of rebellion of a rather large group of peace MPs of a more sort of Catholic conservative ilk who pushed this issue. And so we don't know, of course, what exactly the conversations were that were happening behind the scenes in Kaczynski's office on Novogrodska street in Warsaw. But we do know that these pressures were there, and Kaczynski presumably believed that with the presidential elections then behind them in the summer of 2020, and with COVID restrictions enforced, that in theory would limit any public response to a move to restrict the abortion law, that he could get away with doing it. And now was the time to deliver on those promises. So while, yes, it's an interesting hypothetical to consider, it wasn't just a thoughtless mistake. It was a move that was made because of the fact that Peace's ideological coalition has never been entirely homogeneous and there are different forces within it.
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B
Thank you. I think that's actually a very valuable contribution because I think, yeah, absolutely. The general view is that kind of it's homogenous and Kaczynski controls everything. So I think that's very, very helpful to have that detail. So thank you for that. So let's move now to the 2023 election. So the TUSC government was formed after the 2023 elections. In the Journal of Democracy articles, you talk about, or you use two terms, the post illiberal trilemma and militant democracy. And I'd like to ask you if you could outline to our listeners what exactly those terms mean and how they played out in the Polish case. So maybe I'll pass to Ben, if you could explain what those two terms are.
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A
Well, then, to start with the post liberal trilemma. This came about as a result of discussions that we were having essentially when we were finishing the book as to how to understand what's going to happen next. The book tried to sort of give some a degree of foreshadowing of what we could expect in a a post illiberal situation. And it was immediately clear to us when thinking about this, that whoever came in after peace was going to face a significant set of structural constraints. Essentially what they were going to have to do was to act in ways which were effective in dealing with the problems that they faced, in dealing with the issues that they'd inherited with respect to the rule of law and the expectations, both at home and abroad of how they were going to roll back some of these changes. They were going to have to do this in many respects, quickly, in order to ensure that the consequences of the changes that had been implemented by peace could be pushed back before even more harm had been done to Poland's institutions. But they were also going to have to do so in a way which preserved legal procedure and was in accordance with the of liberal legal norms that they had been committing themselves to uphold. And so that put them in something of a difficult position. Sometimes in order to act effectively and act quickly, it's necessary to either bend or to break the law, which is not a problem when you're a government that has set your stall out as capable of and willing to do that. Certainly it wasn't a problem for peace to explore the boundaries of what they were able to do in ways which either bent the law or in many respects or so and according to many observers, stepped over the line and broke it. It's more difficult to do that when you are a government that's come into power promising to restore liberal democracy. How do you act effectively and how do you, how do you act swiftly without compromising the very legal procedures and principles you've committed yourself to uphold. So that trilemma was essentially how to negotiate the fact that when faced with the demands and incentives to act effectively, legally and quickly, sometimes only two of those goals are open to you, to the exclusion of the third. You can act in ways which are legal and swift, but don't really deal with the problem. You can act in ways which are effective and quick, but can't really be done in a way which is legally defensible. And you can act in ways which are effective and legal, but it takes a long time for you to achieve what you want to achieve achieve. And so that those constraints, that sort of structure of constraints was exacerbated by the fact that the TUS government was cohabiting, is cohabiting, and will continue to cohabit with a hostile president who has the capacity to, and has shown him the willingness to use the capacity to push back against a number of the reforms that the government has been expressing its desire to make over the last year and a half. So where the post liberal trilemma is concerned, and I think we see this as sort of the fundamental constraining structure that the current government has had to struggle with. And as we discuss in the article itself, this is a set of constraints that any government potentially could expect to face when coming into power after a period of illiberal government.
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B
More broadly, I wonder, can you maybe. I'll direct this question to Stan. More broadly, could you give us some sense of what the TUSC government actually did in power between its formation and the presidential election? I mean, what would be your balance sheet of assessments on its performance? I mean, in some senses, one might argue, given the coalition of coalition of coalitions that was formed, it was probably almost inevitably likely to disappoint at least a slice of the electorate. But yeah. What would be your evaluation of what the Tusk government was able to achieve in its first 18 months or so of its existence?
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C
Well, I think more important than my evaluation is the evaluation of the Polish electorate, which I think was delivered in the result of the presidential elections in which Tusk's candidate and the coalition's candidate was defeated by the peace candidate. And that was in a way a virtual referendum on the TUSC government. And it reflects what we see in survey after survey where the government's approval ratings are negative. There is an interesting reversal of roles in which, on the one hand, there's fierce criticism of the government for exceeding the bounds of the democratic processes and procedures from the peace side. So peace and its supporters are attacking the TUS government as an existential threat to democracy, using the same kind of language as the opposition under peace was using about the peace government. And the reason they're doing that is because of a number of areas in line with this illiberal post illiberal trilemma that Ben was describing, where the government has chosen swift action at the borders of legality and therefore action that in various respects echoes the decisionist approach that peace took to institutions. Now, of course, it's in a situation in which institutions that have been taken over by the previous government and therefore have incumbents that in order to remove them entirely legally it might take take a long time, which has the disadvantages, first of all of having those illegitimate incumbents still there, but second of all of demobilizing your own political supporters. So in response to that, in a number of areas, the TUSC Government did use decisionist tactics at the borders of legality and in a few cases, probably beyond the law, to take back in inverted commas, institutions that peace had politicized above all the public media, which is still in liquidation in theory because of the unconventional method that the government chose to try and replace its board, the board of public television, for instance. And it's turned out to be almost as biased as public media were under peace, but just in favor of the current government, as some neutral observers have noted. One could argue about the extent, but it's certainly not a neutral public media. So these kinds of moves, and we saw those moves in a range of other institutions, were very much approved by the most committed sections of especially Tusk's electorate, of the Civic Coalition electorate, and attacked by peace as threats to democracy, using the same kind of language as opposition had used under peace, but also not really very much liked by centrist voters who also saw these moves as not what had been promised in, in terms of arrest. That's not how rule of law can be restored by, by not observing punctilious principles. But that's where Tusk uses this phrase of militant democracy. To restore democracy, some corners have to be cut. That's the front. That's the, the language that Tusk used. But the problem is they've only done that in the a few areas. They've been half measures in a way. They're not as unified as peace. They have this coalition. They're not as decisive as peace. They don't have the same conviction as peace. So they haven't gone as far. Which means they've also dissatisfied poor voters who want more. They want to see peace appointed judges out, and most of them are still there. They want to see more comprehensive change, which the opposition, sorry, the government undertook, simply can't deliver because of its own diversity. So there's the internal constraint. They can't do anything on abortion law because they can't agree among themselves among the different options in the government. And as Ben mentioned, because they have a hostile president with veto powers, but really they haven't delivered much legislation for that hostile president to veto. So they haven't managed to agree on legislation themselves. And that's led to a great deal of dissatisfaction among people who voted for coalition parties in the 2023 parliamentary elections. They see that not enough is being done. There's no sort of legislative results. The coalition is increasingly divided. And then on the other hand, you have peace supporters who are very mobilized and Confederatia supporters as well, who are very mobilized by the idea that this is an incompetent government that is also breaking democratic principles. And therefore we got the presidential election results that we did as a result of dissatisfaction from those different groups of voters.
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B
So we've talked quite a bit about presidential elections. I think maybe also just very helpful, just briefly, if I can ask one of you to just outline for the listeners exactly what the powers of the Polish presidency are. They seem to have been quite important as a bit of a bloc. You mentioned veto powers and the like. But just for the comparativist audience, what would you say are the main kind of powers of the Polish presidency, and how would you rank it in their kind of comparative tables of powers of presidencies?
- [36:41]
A
Well, the Polish president, in many respects, he's tended to have a somewhat ceremonial function, certainly since the powers of the presidency were reduced during the early to mid-1990s. But alongside that have been some significant powers which in conditions of cohabitation, make it possible for the president to be a significant player in the executive in particular, as we've already mentioned, the capacity to veto legislation which has acted in both positive and negative sense, in the sense that the President Duda has been able to actively veto legislation, but has also been able to exert a negative impact on the government's willingness to take action in the first place, knowing that they are likely to face a veto from the president. So because that requires a three fifths majority in Parliament to overturn, which no Polish government in recent memory has really been able to reliably achieve, it would take a bipartisan issue of immense significance for such a majority to be conceivable in the first place. And in such a polarized political environment, bipartisan issues are so few and far between. What is also significant, and I think one of the things which has been particularly effective both in as a sort of a positive instrument, but also a negative incentive towards not taking action, is the fact that the president can request constitutional review of laws before signing them into power. In the present situation, where we have a constitutional tribunal, the legitimacy of which is disputed by the government and is essentially ignored by them, sending a law to the Constitutional Tribunal is akin to simply parking it and doing so in such a way that allows the president to wash his hands of it, he can say, well, I haven't vetoed this. I've passed this to the Constitutional Tribunal. It's not my fault if the government refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the tribunal. So those two instruments make it possible for a president to have a very significant impact both on the reality of a government being able to realize its their legislative agenda, but also that government's perception of what it is possible for them to do. And I think that one of the reasons why the current government has been so hobbled over the last year and a half has not been so much by positive actions taken by the President to restrict what it's able to do, but by this lingering awareness that whatever it is that they try to do, if the President is sufficiently motivated to try and block it, he has two very powerful instruments that will allow him to do that.
- [39:38]
C
Can I just come in there as well? Just to answer, Tim, a question you asked before, which was essentially from my opinion on what the current government is doing, I can give it here because I think it was a political mistake and I don't know if you agreed, Ben, but if I think it was a political mistake of the TUS government not to put more legislation before the President and before President Duda and force him to veto, first of all, it would show the agency of the government, it would show that it was actually getting work done and that it was clearly not its fault. Then that there would be a hostile president vetoing it and not allowing it to deliver its agenda. I think that that would have helped in the presidential elections that we've just seen. And I think it was a mistake not to do that and to allow themselves, as you've described, Ben, to be hobbled by merely the threat of a Duda veto.
- [40:30]
A
I think it was a mistake that was informed by the conviction that after the presidential election the situation would change.
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C
Exactly.
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A
There wasn't any sense in projecting a sort of sense of ineffectuality by letting President Duda veto all of these important bills, but simply to wait things out for Traskovsky to get in and for them to be able to reset and push forward this agenda in the second half of their term of office.
- [41:00]
B
So that segues nicely into reflecting on the fact that the recent presidential elections TUS candidate Tchaskovsky was beaten by the peace backed candidate Novrodsky in a very tight second round runoff, 50.9 against 49.1. I think if I'm correct, in fact, on election night it looked as if Navrotsky had lost according to the exit polls and Trzkovsky's side was actually celebrating. We've touched a little bit on why there was a drop in support for the Tusk candidate that side of the political spectrum. But I wanted to just ask briefly whether you think that the peace side of the political spectrum had actually learnt from its defeat in 2023. And that's part of the story that helps explain why Nodsky was successful. Or would you place most of the explanation for the outcome of the election essentially amongst voters disappointed with the performance of the TUS government?
- [42:02]
C
I would put the emphasis more on the mistakes of the Tusk government and see this election, as I mentioned before, as a kind of referendum on its performance. Most observers felt from start to finish that Karl Novodsky was not in himself a strong candidate and that therefore that this was not a candidate that reflected a particular learning of PISA's or a particular sort of talent in Peace's political ranks. The one thing, though, that did turn out to be a good decision was to choose a candidate who was as far to the right within Peace's relatively broad tense as possible, the candidate as adjacent as possible to the far right Confederacy grouping. Now that was clearly a very intentional decision and it was a decision that ended up paying off. There was a certain point where it didn't look like it was going to pay off. So before Christmas, Novrotsky's poll ratings were bottoming out and he looked like he might even be overtaken by the Confederacy candidate. But in the end, the staying power of Peace's resources seemed to win out. The candidate himself got into his stride and in the second round it became a real advantage that Novrotsky was attractive to the especially overwhelmingly young male voters who had voted for Suavelmune Mensin, the far right Confederacy candidate, in the first round. That was the reason that Novrotsky would have been chosen in the first place. And that turned out to be a good decision. The vast majority of those Confederates, of those Menzen first round voters went to Novrotsky in the second round, which might seem obvious, but it wasn't what happened in 2020? So in 2020, the voters for Confederacia's candidate, Ben, who was Krzysztof Bossak, went almost 50, 50 between Duda and Krzkowski in the second round. There are multiple reasons for that. We don't have time to discuss them. One of them is that Confederacia is a protest vote party and therefore they were more inclined to vote against Duda in 2020 because he was the establishment. Whereas in this election in 2025, Traskovsky became, and in multiple ways that didn't help him, essentially the establishment candidate, almost an incumbent candidate because of the fact that he was attached to this very unpopular, you know, relatively unpopular government. So that was a good decision. So Whether that was, I'm not sure that that was learning anything in particular from the 2023 election debate as such, I think it was observing the trend of Confederacy's rise in popularity and understanding what would be required in the second round and getting voters from those third parties candidates would be very, very important.
- [44:53]
A
One thing that's worth bearing in mind about Novrotsky's candidacy is that he very much came through at the last minute for the vast majority of the campaign, period. Traskovsky was regarded as a clear favorite because he was out polling Novrotsky to a extent. So I think that initially there was a sense certainly among some Peace observers, aligned observers, that Navrotsky was a candidate who had been chosen almost sort of in the absence of having a clear understanding of a candidate who was available, who could take on a government backed candidate with the wind in his sails and do so successfully. There was a sense that perhaps more moderate candidates were unwilling to commit to campaigns campaigning for the presidency. And Navrosky was very much a kind of a residual candidate that they got hold of in the absence of anyone more prominent from within the party. For the reasons that Stan mentioned. It turned out that actually choosing a candidate of that nature, somebody who was going to be able to appeal unapologetically to much of the far right beyond Peace's own extreme, was in fact a significant reason of his success. But I think to go back to your initial question, the key word here, which was mentioned by Stan when talking about the government's first year and a half more generally, is complacency. You alluded to this yourself, Tim, in your question on election night when the initial exit poll results came in. It wasn't just that there was a sense that Traskoski was likely to win this, but more, as he saw with the immediate response, an absolute certainty, certainly on his part, that he had one. And yet there was quite a telling moment in what turned out to be erroneously on his part, a victory speech where somebody a couple of rows back actually seemed to be trying to tell him that actually don't get ahead of yourself here. We have signs that potentially things could be different. And he actually turned around to that person and told them to keep quiet and he was not going to be swayed from declaring his victory. And so I think that was was symptomatic of a degree of complacency that pervaded his candidacy, this sense that he was far enough ahead not to have to worry about Novrosky overtaking him. The question for him really was going to be to what extent he could maintain his majority. So, oddly, despite the closeness of the exit poll result, he didn't seem to exercise any sort of caution in responding to that exit poll. The direction of travel for Novrodsky should surely have alerted him to the fact that this was going to be a lot closer than he'd initially anticipated. But the fact that he didn't respond, the fact that he took a margin of victory in an exit poll that was within the margin of error as evidence of his victory, was symptomatic of the complacency that pervaded his campaign and the sense that really it was his to win when, as it turned out, Navrosky was a mortal, more credible campaigner than many within the government were willing to give him credit for.
- [48:15]
B
Thank you. So time is a little bit against us. It's always great to chat about Polish politics. It would be remiss of me not to ask one final question, a broader comparative one. So, I mean, Poland is a pretty fascinating case in and of itself, but I think it also does provide some wider lessons. The TUS government's experience science raises some profound questions about priorities, about sequencing, about speed in dealing with periods of democratic erosion, blacksliding, executive, Anglo, dasma, autocratization, whichever label you want to use. So very briefly, and I know this is a topic for a podcast all in of itself, but very briefly, what do you think are the wider comparative lessons both for Central and Eastern Europe and for the wider study of democracy? Backsliding? Resilience? Ben, as the comparative political scientist of the Dynamic Duo, maybe I'll throw it in your direction first.
- [49:13]
A
Yeah, I think one of the key lessons of what we've seen in Poland, and it has been borne out by what we've been observing in a number of countries at the same time and subsequently, is that the kind of actions that law and justice have been taking, the ease with which they were able to undermine both institutions and norms while remaining nominally democratic polity, is something that is readily imitable abroad. I think one of the key facts of the peace term in power is that a lot of this is very experiential. They started sort of undermining some institutions, realizing what they could get away with, realizing what was necessary to be done in order to continue this process of undermining these institutions and overturning liberal democratic norms. And I think to an extent, they were actually quite surprised by how far they were able to get with this. And so a phrase that we refer to in the book is that Poland has served as a kind of proof of concept for this, chipping away at the integrity of liberal democratic institutions and liberal democratic norms in a way which we're now seeing observers in a number of other countries paying a lot of interest to. I mean, there have been observers from the U.S. for example, who have explicitly taken example from what has happened in Poland and Hungary and said, well, look at what these governments have been able to achieve, both in institutional and in policy terms. There is a set of hegemonic norms which can be quite easily undermined, more easily than many of us thought. And so I think that one of the key messages for scholars of comparative political science more generally, and particularly those who study democracies, is that institutions and norms which are seen as well established and reasonably be safe from being undermined can actually be undermined much more easily than a lot of people thought. And we're finding this out certainly in the US now and in the uk, where certain things that we thought would never happen in more established political systems are turning out to be achievable. And many of those who are protagonists who are trying to undermine democracy in. In other countries are explicitly drawing on the Polish and Hungarian examples. Examples.
- [51:36]
C
Could I add something quickly on the present and which is a theoretical question really, of political strategy, which is what happens when liberal political forces adopt illiberal rhetoric and policies for strategic reasons? Does it work or does it not work? And I think there's some sort of conflicting evidence in the Polish case, because in the issue of migration, as we've seen across Europe really over the last few years, years we've seen liberal groupings, and particularly Tusk's grouping, moving to the right to use the kind of language that peace had used previously about protection of borders, building border walls. Tusk has specifically used language of threats to Western civilization from migrants from outside of Western culture. And this to some degree may have helped in the 2023 election campaign because it defused the migration issue issue. Trusk attacked peace for having let migrants from the Middle east and North Africa into Poland, and again adopting the style that peace had used in 2015. And it may have helped to defuse that issue, one that peace had used in 2015 and couldn't use as effectively in 2023. But since then, it really is an open question of whether this act of moving the whole window to the right essentially seeds the ground to. To one's political opponents and strengthens the position of one's political opponents in a way that may well have benefited Navrotsky and the confederacy of far right candidate Swarovni Manson in the recent presidential elections because they took the strongest stance on this migration issue. And now we see self appointed patrols of football hooligans on the Polish borders, protests that have broken out across the country against illegal migration and really a spiral of fear mongering in which one would have to say the current liberal government of Tusk or his party in particular has played some part and we see it in other countries too. I mean, Keir Starmer has expressed his regret at using the phrase island of strangers as part of a perhaps not as radical, but nevertheless shift of the Labour Party in a similar in a not dissimilar direction on these issues in response to voter concerns, in response of the success success of right wing parties in mobilizing voters around these issues. So I don't think Poland gives us an answer to that question, but it gives some perhaps conflicting evidence that might contribute to wider discussions of that question which seem particularly pressing at this moment in time.
- [54:10]
B
Well Jiankuye, thank you so much to Stan and Ben. I wish we could keep talking for longer, but I can hear my editor of this series say time is against us, so unfortunately we have to draw things to a close. So thank you so much to the two of you for joining the People Power Politics podcast and for talking to us about the twists and turns of Polish politics. Congratulations again on your excellent, insightful article in the Journal of Democracy and your new book, a Reminder for listeners that Democracy After Illiberalism A Warning from Poland. Their article is out in July's issue of the Journal of Democracy and Good the Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution is due for publication in September this year, and it's published by Stanford University Press. I have already ordered my copy and I encourage listeners to do the same. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the People Power Politics podcast brought to you by.
- [55:12]
C
Cedar, the Center for Elections, Democracy, Accountability.
- [55:15]
B
And Representation at the University of Birmingham. To learn more about our center and.
- [55:19]
C
The exciting work that we do on.
- [55:21]
B
These issues around the world, please follow us on Twitter eadarbham and visit our.
- [55:28]
C
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