Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley, "Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network

Episode: Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley, "Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Date: September 8, 2025

Host: Tim Jones

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the recent book Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution by Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley. Tim Jones hosts an in-depth discussion on the evolution of Poland’s political landscape, focusing heavily on the Law and Justice Party’s (PiS) rule from 2015 to 2023, the ideological transformations at play, and the broader implications for European democracy and illiberal governance. Poland’s experience is contrasted with Hungary’s Orban-led illiberal regime, and the conversation also ranges to future possibilities ahead of the 2027 elections and shifting political alliances.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Poland’s Illiberal Turn in Context

• Poland’s growing international significance: Now a “waking European giant,” with economic and military heft, Poland’s trajectory deeply matters to European politics ([02:12]).
• Why Poland’s journey was “missed or dismissed”: The Law and Justice era (2015–2023) challenged prior assumptions of Poland as the “model pupil” of post-communist transition ([04:22], Ben Stanley). This shook up observers and led to greater Western media attention.

2. Comparing Poland and Hungary: The Orban vs. Kaczyński Paradigm

• Orban as illiberal figurehead: Hungarian PM Viktor Orban proudly championed “illiberal democracy;” PiS drew inspiration but couldn’t replicate Hungary, mostly due to lack of a constitutional majority ([05:45], Stanley Bill).
  • “Unlike the Law and Justice Party in Poland, [Orban’s] explicitly used that term of illiberal democracy to describe his own project in Hungary…” ([05:45], Stanley Bill)
  • PiS had to rely on “ad hoc mechanisms” without Hungary's constitutional leverage.
• Influence on global politics: Both Orban and Kaczyński have influenced the American right; intellectual circles around Trump took inspiration from CEE examples of backsliding as “proof of concept” ([08:13], Ben Stanley).

3. Corruption and Political Motivation

• Less grift than Hungary: Though PiS saw its share of political appointments and some corruption, it didn’t reach the “systematic level” seen with Orban’s Hungary ([09:37], Stanley Bill).
  • “We haven’t seen the same kind of sense of personal or familial self-enrichment as we see in Hungary...Kaczyński isn’t building himself a hacienda style residence…” ([12:11], Ben Stanley)
• Party-building over self-enrichment: Kaczyński’s focus was on party strength and machine-building, with a tacit expectation that appointees support the party ([13:53], Stanley Bill).

4. Solidarity, Ideological Divides, and Polish Political Identity

• Solidarity’s legacy: Poland's Solidarity movement was ideologically diverse, and post-1989 politics became defined less by classic left-right divides than by “liberal” vs. “solidarist” currents ([14:48], Ben Stanley).
  • “This was a very ideologically heterogeneous movement...” ([14:48], Ben Stanley)
• PiS’s unique alignment: Conservative on culture, solidarist (center-left) on economic/social policy—a rarity among successful mainstream parties ([18:44], Stanley Bill).
  • “In cultural questions…the party is very much positioned on the conservative right... But at the same time... not rejecting the market... but... challenging some of the problems of the transition...” ([18:44], Stanley Bill)
  • The child benefit program is highlighted as an emblematic policy.

5. The Concept of ‘Impossibilism’ and Institutional Resistance

• Kaczyński v. Liberal Institutions: PiS railed against “impossibilism”—the inability to implement policy because of liberal constitutional constraints ([23:53], Tim Jones; [24:24], Ben Stanley).
  • “If you straightjacket yourself within a constitution which is ostensibly neutral... that's going to create a situation in which those politicians...are going to be unable to implement a lot of the policies...” ([24:24], Ben Stanley)
• Ad hoc governance: Lacking a constitutional majority, PiS preferred decisionist, improvisational governance over formal constitutional change—acting as if the constitution did not bind them ([24:24], Ben Stanley).
  • “It ultimately served the party’s purposes to govern as if the Constitution did not bind them...” ([24:24], Ben Stanley)

6. The 2027 Elections and the Rise of Confederation

• Future of right-wing politics: With PiS’s position weakened and Confederation (Konfederacja) rising, coalition politics are inevitable and fraught ([29:17], Tim Jones; [29:42], Stanley Bill).
  • Confederation threatens PiS both electorally (by siphoning off the radical right) and ideologically (promoting libertarian economics over PiS’s redistributive legacy).
  • “Confederation seems to have different priorities, one of which is a…more libertarian approach to economics and less redistributive. Is this going to change the nature of a PiS-led government?” ([29:17], Tim Jones)
  • “That's a very...interesting question. And in many ways it could become the pressing question of Polish politics going forward…” ([29:42], Stanley Bill)
• Coalition instability: A right-wing coalition would be unstable, with deep differences on Ukraine, economic policy, and identity—plus competition for the same voter base.
• “Quantum of uncertainty”: Major internal division within Confederation and PiS, plus ambitious personalities, would likely make for tumultuous governance ([35:03], Ben Stanley).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the international role of Poland:

  • "Poland is much bigger and a much more influential beast, only this year joining the trillion dollar club...and massively outspending France, Germany, Italy and Britain on rearmament against the threat from Russia."
    — Tim Jones [02:12]

• On Orban vs. Kaczyński:

  • “[Orban] has managed to become quite influential and quite recognizable in those circles and sought to promote the Hungarian experience and his own illiberal ideas. Now, the Law and Justice government was interested in partnerships with international forces of analogous political views and positions, but...found it more difficult to do so.”
    — Stanley Bill [05:45]

• On the essence of party politics under Kaczyński:

  • "In Kaczyński’s sense, politics is really all there is. Politics is really all that he's interested in doing."
    — Ben Stanley [12:11]

• On party/government corruption:

  • "When family members or members of the party are given plum jobs on the boards of state owned companies with large salaries attached without doing much, it has been a tacit expectation, according to various reports, that part of that income is donated to the party."
    — Stanley Bill [13:53]

• On the nature of ideological divides in Poland:

  • "Poland has arguably developed the purest version of not having a left and a right, instead having a liberal movement and what you call a solidarist movement."
    — Tim Jones [14:16]
  • "We didn't see the emergence of a classic left right divide, as some had been expecting, was precisely because this post Solidarity side was split on these questions."
    — Ben Stanley [14:48]

• On the ‘impossibilism’ of Polish liberal institutions:

  • "If you straightjacket yourself within a constitution... that’s going to create a situation in which those politicians...are going to be unable to implement a lot of the policies that they wanted to implement because they're going to be restrained in doing that by unelected institutions that have no democratic mandate."
    — Ben Stanley [24:24]
  • "It ultimately served the party's purposes to govern as if the Constitution did not bind them, and as if a Constitution could not bind them."
    — Ben Stanley [24:24]

• On the prospects for a PiS-Confederation coalition:

  • "It creates a big conflict both within PiS and potentially between any PiS and Confederation government...How they would arrive at policy positions on those kinds of issues is a very open question. Would be a very difficult negotiation. It would almost certainly be an unstable and tumultuous government..."
    — Stanley Bill [29:42]
  • "Law and Justice might have been able to benefit in 2015 and 2019 from a very particular set of circumstances that allowed them to achieve an independent majority. But...coalition governments are the norm..."
    — Ben Stanley [35:03]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [02:12] – Introduction to Poland’s political revolution and international context
• [04:22] – Media coverage and Poland’s “model pupil” status disrupted
• [05:45] – Orban’s influence and PiS’s comparative limitations
• [08:13] – Influence on Trump and Western political circles
• [09:37] – Corruption: Poland vs. Hungary, party-building vs. self-enrichment
• [14:48] – Solidarity’s legacy and lack of classic left/right divide
• [18:44] – PiS’s “right on culture, left on economics” identity; child benefit policy
• [24:24] – The impossibilism critique; ad hoc governance over constitutional change
• [29:42] – 2027 election prospects and the rise of Confederation
• [35:03] – Coalition challenges and instability forecast

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Conclusion

This episode provides a comprehensive, nuanced look at Poland’s illiberal experiment, connecting local developments to broader European and global political trends. Bill and Stanley offer both historical perspective and acute analysis of present and future challenges, highlighting the complexities of ideological identity in post-communist societies, the constraints and improvisations of illiberal governance, and the volatile, shifting nature of contemporary coalition politics in Poland.

Transcript

[Stanley Bill]

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[Marshall Po]

A hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk.

[Tim Jones]

Viktor orban and his 15 year campaign to turn Hungarian democracy illiberal are so loud and so made for the American market that Poland's interrupted eight year experiment can be missed or dismissed as a historical diversion. But Poland is much bigger and a much more influential beast only this year joining the trillion dollar club the size of its gross domestic product and massively outspending France, Germany, Italy and Britain on rearmament against the threat from Russia. From 2015-23 this waking European giant was governed by Peace, the Law and Justice Party and its sulstyle chief Yaroslav Kaczyski, who stayed out of office but ran the show from party HQ regarding economic and social liberalism as inherently unpolish and its institutions as roadblocks. To quote good changes, Kicinski spent eight years bending them to his will while at the same time buying the loyalty of a traditionally left wing electorate with generous welfare schemes. Now 76 and defeated by Donald Tursk and his coalition of liberals in the left at the 2023 parliamentary elections, Kicinski hasn't given up. His candidate won this year's presidential election and the Polish right looks well placed to win back power in 2027. To discuss the past and future of Polish illiberalism, I'm joined by Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley, almost a palindrome whose book Good the Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution is published this week by Stanford University Press. Stanley Bill is Professor of Polish Studies at the University of Cambridge and founder of the Excellent Notes from Poland website. Ben Stanley is an Associate professor at the center for the Study of Democracy at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. I'm Tim Jones and this is the 242 podcast with new books in European politics. Your book spans a quarter century of Poland's political history, but with a tight focus on the period from 2015 till today, and this time seems to provide lessons for everyone, basically how an illiberal project can work and how hard it is to unpick it. Now Trump is obviously in a world of his own, but compared to Orban, do you think the Polish experience has been insufficiently covered? In English at least, I would say.

[Ben Stanley]

That it was a period certainly where the Polish experience was more prominent in the news than it previously had been. Often Western media outlets will tend to have a somewhat less comprehensive coverage of Central and Eastern European countries anyway. But I think that one of the reasons why the Polish experience after 2015 piqued the interest of a lot of media organizations was precisely because Poland had been seen as a sort of an unproblematic case before then. It had been seen as A country which had democratised well, which had joined the European Union, which had been a not particularly controversial member of the European Union, and had been seen almost as a kind of model pupil of post1989 transition. So when things started to go in a different direction, this led to the media sitting up and taking interest, particularly given Poland's size and potential meaningfulness as an awkward partner within the European Union. For as long as it was playing by the rules, as long as it was going along with the main current of liberal democracy, Poland was seen as an unproblematic case. But given its size in particular, as soon as it started misbehav, as soon as it started diverging from this Orthodox model of post 1989 development that led to a lot of people paying Poland a lot more attention than they previously had.

[Stanley Bill]

I think it's interesting on the comparison with Orban, by the way, One thing that we talk about a little bit at the end of the book is the way in which Orban has been a more prominent figure in a movement of kind of international radical right. He's managed to be, despite obviously leading a much smaller country than Poland, he's managed to become quite influential and quite recognizable in those circles and sought to promote the Hungarian experience and his own illiberal ideas. And of course, unlike the Law and Justice Party in Poland, he's explicitly used that term of illiberal democracy to describe his own project in Hungary, and he sought, in a way to export some of those ideas. Now, the Law and Justice government was interested in partnerships with international forces of analogous political views and positions, but for various reasons found it more difficult to do so. And that's something that we explore a little bit in one of the late chapters of the book. So it is an interesting comparison. And I think perhaps another dimension of the difference here is that the degree of power that Orban managed to capture in Hungary was of a significantly higher order than what Law and Justice was ever able to do in Poland. So in Poland, the opposition, even in its worst period, around the 2019 parliamentary elections, where Law and Justice achieved its best ever result, the record result of any party in an election in post1989 Poland of 44%, even in that period, they were not able to capture the constitutional majority that Orban had in Hungary to allow him, in an almost legitimate way, to make some of the radical changes that he made. Law and justice was never able to do that. And that's why, and we write about this a lot in the book, it had to use a whole range of ad hoc mechanisms to attempt to introduce the kind of revolution that Orban had in Hungary. But it is an interesting comparison between the Hungarian case and the Polish case. And of course, there are a lot of similarities. And we talk in the book about the ways in which Law and Justice in Poland in many respects was borrowing aspects of Orban's model in Hungary and attempting to apply it, but in quite different conditions. Above all, lacking that constitutional majority that Orban has had at certain points in time.

[Ben Stanley]

I would also note here as well, you mentioned in the question that Trump is in a world of his own, which is true to some extent in the sense that clearly what Trump does ultimately has a much broader effect in a geopolitical sense. If the US Is backsliding, then that's going to have much more significant consequences globally than in the Polish case. But we should sort of nevertheless pay attention to the fact that in many respects what Orban and what Kaczynski have been doing in their respective countries has provided a degree of inspiration for the intellectual circles around Trump. There's been a lot of interest from the side of those who are collaborating with Trump to the extent that collaboration with Trump is really possible, to try to implement some of the kind of changes that have occurred in Poland and Hungary over that period. One of the things we touch on in the book is the idea that Poland and Hungary have served as a kind of proof of concept for illiberal backsliding that other countries are now trying to imitate.

[Tim Jones]

If you look at the Orban regime, it's been there a long time, as you say, it's been able to actually remake the constitution. But you've seen an awful lot of grift there. You've seen an awful lot of grift among the Trump family, Kaczynski and the people around him. Maybe I'm naive. It seems to be more ideological and less self interested. Is that correct?

[Stanley Bill]

That's an interesting point. I think it is not entirely untrue. And on various international indices of corruption, for instance, and graft, Poland definitely has been more successful than Hungary in avoiding some of the worst abuses. So there had been a range of scandals and there were a number of different scandals under the law and justice government, of family members, of politicians being employed in plush jobs in state owned companies as purely political appointments and a range of different corruption affairs. But it is true that it's probably not on the same systematic level of the Orban affiliated business community in Hungary and the Orban family. I think that is an interesting difference which is partly connected to political culture, but also partly connected to personalities. Here, the diary. Swav Kaczyski is not an individual who doesn't have an extended family really of his own, although there are some of his family members that were connected to certain of the corruption scandals that did happen in Poland. So that sort of would contradict that idea. But nevertheless, on the whole it's not the same, with some individual exceptions, not the same systematic level. And I think that's partly to do with Kaczyski's personality. And there have been various times at which he has been very keen to punish members of the party who were caught red handed in various kinds of corrupt activities and even to expel them from the party. So it's not that there was no types of graft, it's not that there was no sort of politicization of and capture of public funds, that there was, under the law and justice, time in government. And a whole range of actors ideologically adjacent to law and justice were able to benefit from a stream of public funds, right in media, in various kinds of think tank organizations. But that to some degree was on a different scale, a continuation of what had already happened in Polish politics previously, that the central role of the state in distributing a range of different funds and posts because of the state's control of some of the largest companies in Poland and because of various state institutions. This did happen, but not in the same systematic way. So it's an interesting comparison, I think.

[Ben Stanley]

Where there is a systematic element in the Polish case, it's. And in the case of law and justice in particular, although, as Stan has said, this goes beyond the. The single case of law and justice. It's about building the party, it's about creating a political machine, something that can potentially, you know, survive Kaczynski's departure from the political scene. Although there are some other reasons why that may be difficult for law and justice to achieve. We haven't seen the same kind of sense of personal or familial self enrichment as we see in Hungary. I mean, Kaczyski isn't building himself a hacienda style residence of the kind that we've seen Orban creating for himself. And there isn't that sense of trying to generate sort of generational wealth for the Kaczynski family, not least because. Because Kaczynski doesn't really have anybody to pass it on to. The difference between Kaczynski and Orban is not so much that Orban is not ideological and Kaczynski is, but rather that both of them have had a very pragmatic aspect to their political activities as well as an ideological one. I think the difference is that in Kaczynski's sense, politics is really all there is. Politics is really all that he's interested in doing. Orban's self enrichment and his exploitation of the possibilities that power has given him for that seems to serve some purpose outside politics itself. Whereas Kaczynski is very much interested in and motivated by building a political machine that is going to dominate and hegemonize Polish politics. And anything outside that is really fairly irrelevant detail.

[Stanley Bill]

Just to give a very briefly an example of that. When family members or members of the party are given plum jobs on the boards of state owned companies with large salaries attached without doing much, it has been a tacit expectation, according to various reports, that part of that income is donated to the party, so that the party and the party machine then benefits from that.

[Tim Jones]

I mean, let's go back to the origin story here, which is, and those of us who remember the Solidarity movement, it always felt like a bit of a push me pull you. It had devout Gdansk conservative Catholics, free market liberals, even a few old trots in the movement. 40 years on. And you write about this, and it's very interesting what you say. Poland has arguably developed the purest version of not having a left and a right, instead having a liberal movement and what you call a solidarist movement. Can you talk more about that?

[Ben Stanley]

The legacy of Solidarity is interesting in that respect because as people noted at the time, but perhaps wasn't sufficiently appreciated certainly until the early 1990s, was that this was a very ideologically heterogeneous movement. And this was a movement which initially was oriented towards trying to deal with some of the problems of actually existing socialism rather than pursuing democratization. And when it came to a situation at the end of the 1980s where it was clear that democracy was now among the possibilities for future development, it. It rapidly became evident within the Solidarity movement there were people, both rank and file, but also the leading members of Solidarity, with very different conceptions of what a free, democratizing Poland would look like, and in particular very different conceptions of what it was necessary to do about the previous regime and the previous political elites. And so these questions what should a new Poland look like after, after the end of communism? And what process should we go through to make sure that democratization was not just about imposing a set of institutions, but also handling transition in a way which was fair and just to those who had suffered in the past, these debates quickly proved very central to the emergence of political disagreements. And we have something of a false start in that respect, because these issues were so dominant, because the question of how to deal with the immediate legacy of the communist past was so dominant. The main political divides that emerged in the 1990s were about post solidarity parties versus the communist successor party, essentially. So did you identify with the communist regime and its successor party, or did you identify with post Solidarity or other minor opposition movements? And it was really only at the beginning of the second decade of transition that the more ideological basis of political splits and disagreements began to become evident. And it was really with as Poland completed the process of transition in a formal sense to a liberal democracy, that the questions of ideological differences began to become more politically salient and expressed through differences between the major political parties. And so one of the reasons why we didn't see the emergence of a classic left right divide, as some had been expecting, was precisely because this post Solidarity side was split on these questions. The right in Poland, as it existed during the 1990s, comprised those who had a sort of a Thatcherite attachment to this neoliberal project of transition and were very much free market oriented, not particularly interested in questions of social conservatism, although instinctively probably more social conservative than not. On the other hand, we also had a bunch of parties that identified themselves with the right in the sense that they didn't identify themselves with the left, and indeed identified themselves very much against the left, who had very strongly socially conservative attitudes and also a much more ambiguous approach to the market. Not rejecting the market, not wanting to embrace socialist economics, but at the same time being very sceptical about the extent to which unfettered free markets could serve the needs of Polish society. So because there was that split among post Solidarity movements, it was difficult for the right really to articulate itself as a single force espousing classically right wing politics. So the interpretation of what left and right mean in Poland, particularly what right means, is still very much up for debate among participants of members of the political elite.

[Stanley Bill]

So just to take up on that of where law and justice or peace fits, it's in that latter grouping that Ben just described from the early formation of Poland's party system. And that is a party that positions itself in a way that in traditional terms might be characterized somewhat simplistically as a kind of right left combination. So in cultural questions, in questions of values, the party is very much positioned on the conservative right with Roman Catholic values, traditional notions of national identity, and on the conservative side, on a whole range of familiar culture war issues that we recognize from democracies across particularly the Western world. So questions like LGBT rights, abortion and so on. But at the same time, and it's important that almost from the very beginning, Yarousov Kaczyski has had a consistent position of, as Ben described, not rejecting the market and in general terms, going along, particularly in the earlier period with Poland's neoliberal transformation. But from Jaroslaw Kaczyski's first party, even in the policy documents of that party in 1990, you see him challenging some of the problems of the transition, and in particular pointing to the need to protect people who are socially and economically disadvantaged by the transition and who are most exposed to the various dramatic changes that ensued with the closing down of state owned enterprises, with inflation and so on. So from the very beginning, this is this solidarity idea, which peace picks up, law and justice, peace picks up and really delivers in a concrete policy position in advance of the 2015 elections and from there on, in what in a Polish context appears as a kind of redistributive politics, a redistributive politics of a social policy that we might in other contexts think of as more traditionally on the left, and certainly functionally in the Polish context appeared that way. So the large symbolic example of this is the child benefit program that was very popular and very successful in the way in which it lifted a lot of children in poorer areas out of poverty, that it did contribute to reducing various kinds of social inequality in Poland. So child benefit policies and a range of state benefits. The piece introduced from 2015, and that there's a great deal of empirical evidence to demonstrate, was an important part of its popularity and an important part of it, in fact, expanding its share of the vote in 2019. So you have a party that, with respect to the traditional left, right divides, is across, is straddling different parts of that divide, right on culture, left on economic and social policy, including some limited ideas of nationalizing certain parts of the economy or increasing the role of the state in the economy. Relatively modest attempts in this direction, because again, in broad terms, pieces constrained by the neoliberal path that Poland has been on since 1989 and its institutionalization in the various forms of the European Union, in the various agreements and legal constraints of the European Union, but nevertheless, some work at the margins of nationalizing banks, attempting to introduce large taxes on foreign retailers, for instance in Poland, things like that at the margins, but above all, in that social policy so we found that to be an interesting example of a phenomenon that is visible in very different ways elsewhere, where the traditional left right electorates obviously over the last several decades have been eroding in Western democracies as well. And so we're interested in the idea that there really isn't a more powerful expression though of this unconventional left right politics in the mainstream, a party that actually wins power than peace in Poland, because some of the non traditional parties in Western democracies have looked at that combination. So Marine Le Pen, to some extent, particularly in earlier periods in France, but not parties of power. And in Poland we see this. So we're interested in questions of are there certain phenomena that might be able to express themselves on the so called peripheries in inverted commas earlier than in the established centers of democracy? Maybe. And also, of course, there are specific characteristics of Poland's history and the Polish electorate that contribute to the possibility of that becoming a dominant political combination in a way that it hasn't elsewhere. So that combination in a way is at the centre of our argument about peace's success, in particular its successful combination of those different policy dimensions.

[Tim Jones]

You make a very interesting point, not just about the redistributive policy of peace, but what you describe as Kiczynski's problem with the quote impossibilism. Does that sort of imply to me that he and the people around him, if they'd had more time and more power, would have done more, much more broadly, to take on the institutions, not just of Poland, but the institutions of the European Union? Do you think that's the case or was he more focused simply on these questions of Solidarity and redistribution?

[Ben Stanley]

It's difficult to give a clear answer to this because so much of this rhetoric is tied up with a sort of, in terms of peace's own sort of self explanation for what it was up to. Kaczyski had always argued, really from the beginning of transition, that this impossibilism was a problem for Polish politics, that if you straightjacket yourself within a constitution which is ostensibly neutral, but actually sort of preserves elements of liberal thinking and kind of protects them through the operation of the constitution, that's going to create a situation in which those politicians who are sort of elected by a majority of the voters, or at least by plurality, such as law and justice, are going to be unable to implement a lot of the policies that they wanted to implement because they're going to be restrained in doing that by unelected institutions that have no democratic mandate. So in part, his criticism was of the operation of the system as a whole. It's clear that he is not a sort of a convinced liberal democrat and probably with a bit of prodding would endorse the more explicit formulation of a liberal democracy that Viktor Orban had in practice. What we've seen is that the idea of creating a different constitutional settlement, partly it wasn't really within the power of peace to do so in any case, but it actually served the purposes of the party to a greater extent simply to abandon the idea of pinning yourself down to any specific constitutional settlement and simply pushing forward with changes in accordance with this kind of ad hoc decisionist logic. I think we've seen an evolution of peace's political thinking on the basis of its practice of governing during 2015, 2023, having come to the preceded its victory with a clearly expressed idea of what it wanted to do institutionally, which was set out in a document for a draft new constitution. Questions of a constitutional resettlement were pretty rapidly shelved as it became clear to peace that through this kind of experiential process of what can we get away with doing, how much can we undermine these institutions before facing pushback from within or without? As it became clear that there was a lot more that peace could do to undermine Poland's liberal democratic institutions without tying itself to a new set of constitutional commitments, the idea of replacing the existing constitution with a new settlement fell into abeyance. It's something that the current, the new president Karol Novrodsky has mentioned the possibility of trying to revive. But I think that the evidence of what we saw over the eight years of Law and Justice's tenure in power was that it ultimately served the party's purposes to govern as if the Constitution did not bind them, and as if a Constitution could not bind them. So the decision making processes and the the outcomes of that were more governed by a decisionist logic of what happens is ultimately down to the political sovereign rather than the emergence of a new idea of how Poland might organize itself constitutionally. And I think that if, as some expect PSIs to get back into power in 2027, it's unlikely that we will see a return to talk of a new constitutional settlement even. I would imagine if there is the outside chance that a Law and justice confederacy coalition might achieve a constitutional majority which would give them the possibility to do that, they may use such a majority to modify certain aspects of the Constitution which are currently uncongenial to their aims. But I don't think they'll be looking to replace the Constitution overall with a new settlement simply because it creates too many unpredictable outcomes for them. Rather than tying themselves to the mast of a, of a new constitutional settlement that they can't get away from because they had a hand or the main hand in, in, in drafting, I think that they would rather proceed as they have done until now, simply to govern in more of an ad hoc fashion, ignoring or tendentiously interpreting the Constitution as and when it suits.

[Tim Jones]

You mentioned 2027 there and the rise of Confederation, which is, I wonder whether that is also a political constraint on Kicinsky or whoever succeeds him. Because confederation seems to have different priorities, one of which is a modern, more libertarian approach to economics and less redistributive. Is this going to change the nature of a peace led government after 2027, if that's what we get?

[Stanley Bill]

That's a very, very interesting question. And in many ways it could become the pressing question of Polish politics going forward. Because, look, it's very difficult to predict now, of course, what's going to happen in 2027. It's still two years away. There are many things could change in that period. But if we look at the current polling, if a coalition between Peace and Confederatio were possible, that would be the next government the way that the current polling appears. So the coalition partners of the current liberal government have seen their figures in these average polls decline significantly over the last couple of years and particularly over the after the presidential elections that Karel Novodsky, the Peace candidate, won. So there's a chance at least that that is a prospective government for Poland. But as you say, it's a difficult partnership to contemplate for peace. And this is because there are two main problems in a way for peace with this partnership. One is that it is a party that is taking Peace's voters on a number of issues. So Confederacy's rise in the polls and the success of the Confederacy candidate in the first round of the recent presidential elections was largely, not entirely, but significantly at the expense of peace. So Peace's polling has also declined somewhat in the same period. So this is a party, Confederacy that is eating away at the hard right or radical right part of Peace's electorate. So that's obviously a threat. And Yaroslav Kaczyski has a history of perceiving parties like this to its right as a threat and seeking to consume them, in fact has been the history. So that the phrase nothing to the right of us right or nothing between us and the wall on the right that we would be the party that occupies the whole right side of the political spectrum. But that's always been a difficult balancing act because you've got a wide electoral coalition that includes many centrist conservatives as well, that aren't entirely comfortable with some of the positions that Confederatio would adopt. For instance, on Ukraine, which confederacy has been the most sort of Ukrainophobic party on the Polish scene for a few years now. But that, of course, then pushes peace in that rightward direction. It influences peace, his politics. And so we see that in the choice of Karel Nodsky as the presidential candidate. This is a figure who, in his previous profile and his political statements, is closest to a kind of Confederacy position, both in style and in substance. And he was chosen precisely to hopefully get as many of the Confederacy voters from the first round to choose him in the second round about which is precisely what happened. And so we see these much more Ukraino sceptical positions that he's expressing very clearly. And peace has moved steadily in that direction from being very supportive of Ukraine to being in 2022 to much less so now. And that is a result of a range of different factors, but one of them is the political pressure of confederacy on its right. But then the other problem, as you pointed out very rightly, is this very significant policy disagreement over social policy, over these redistributive policies of peace that were so successful and such an important part of the party's success between 2015 and 2023. Confederatia is the party that is most critical of that politics and has established, in fact, part of its rise over the last few years was occupying the position that the liberals had, in a sense, moved a little bit away from, because the liberals, under the pressure of peace's success, had become a little bit more sympathetic towards redistributive politics because they felt they had to accept, all right, we're going to keep peace's redistributive politics. If you vote us in, we're not going to just get rid of all of that. And that helped them to win in 2023. That gave a place for confederacy to come in even more strongly, as you said, with that sort of economic libertarianism almost and strongly against those kinds of policies. And there are forces in peace, again, that have, you know, perhaps a sympathetic to that line as well. But it creates a big conflict both within peace and potentially between any peace and confederacy or government. What would be government policy on those kinds of questions, on the child benefit programs, on the other kinds of redistributed mechanisms that peace distributed. So it would be for that reason alone, apart from a range of other reasons. And like I said before, if you're competing for the same voters, you know that's always a recipe for conflict within a coalition. But how they would arrive at policy positions on those kinds of issues is a very open question. Would be a very difficult negotiation. It would almost certainly be an unstable and tumultuous government, if that, that's the one that we're going to see. But it is a very important relationship and one to watch over the next few years.

[Ben Stanley]

Yeah, one of the things that we've been seeing not only in Poland, but elsewhere in recent years is the shifts in familiar political constellations. And we can certainly see this in the Polish case, just as in the use of the early 2000s, we saw this divide between the post Solidarity and post Communist parties giving way to a more ideologically inflected divide between broadly liberal and broadly solidaristic parties. We're now seeing changes which the presidential election this year has certainly laid bare in terms of parts of the electorate, in particular younger voters exhibiting substantial volatility and also being much more attracted towards anti system candidates, both of the right and the left. Law and justice might have been able to benefit in 2015 and 2019 from a very particular set of circumstances that allowed them to achieve an independent majority. But in the broad sweep Of Polish post 1989 political history, coalition governments are the norm. Being able to govern by yourself, having the luxury of not having to deal with a troublesome coalition partner, has really only been a, a privilege that Law and justice had from 2015 to 2023. And even then there were internal differences that caused problems for it. So whatever happens after the 2027, in the 202027 election, if law and justice is ultimately to to be the major force in the next government, it's going to be governing alongside parties that are going to cause many of the same problems that pre2015 parties experienced. So in a sense it's not going to be all that different from the experience that other parties had governing before this eight year period of single party government. But for the reasons that Stan has mentioned, Confederacy are going to be a particularly awkward partner, not least because they have their own internal struggles as well. We focused on the issue of the party's economic stance, but there are also significant currents within the party that are much more interested in some pretty radical nativism than they are in the libertarian economic stuff. And on both of those points, Confederacy has the possibility to cause damage to law and justice and be a difficult junior partner. Not just because it's putting a coalition government in the direction of more extremism in a sociocultural sense, and not only because it would be pulling the party away from the coalition, away from its preferences in terms of social policy, but also because it introduces a certain quantum of uncertainty into the functioning of the coalition as a whole. There are several people within the party who have very have their own political ambitions, their own ambitions to be major political figures. And those kinds of ambitions are also going to prove problematic. Jaroslav Kaczynski is used to being the alpha male of any government within which he operates, whether in a formal sense or in an informal sense. And he's going to find it very difficult to cooperate with people who have the same, ultimately the same political mentality. So I think it's not only the. The ideological differences that are going to be problematic, but also the difficulties of governing with a junior coalition partner that knows that it owns a substantial amount of this current anti system energy that exists within a part of the Polish electorate and can deploy that energy for making political mischief if it so decides SA.