The thing about elected authoritarians is that they sometimes lose elections. Such was the case in 2023 with Poland\u2019s Law and Justice party.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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- After a period of democratic backsliding, governments that want to restore democratic rule face an \u201cilliberal trilemma\u201d: They seek to unwind authoritarian rule legally, quickly, and effectively \u2014 but it\u2019s very difficult to achieve all three.<\/span><\/li>\n
- In Poland, efforts to restore liberal democracy has meant choosing between slow, lawful reforms and faster moves that risk bending the rules.<\/span><\/li>\n
- The lesson for countries like the US is that once democratic norms are broken, they\u2019re hard to rebuild \u2014 and the temptation to stretch those norms doesn\u2019t disappear when power changes hands.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\nThe ultra-conservative populist party rode a wave of anti-elite sentiment to power in 2015. What happened next was directly out of the authoritarian playbook: They stacked Poland\u2019s constitutional courts<\/a> with loyalists \u2014 judges who would rubber stamp laws, even if their constitutionality was questionable. They took over a largely independent public media<\/a> and bent it to conservative extremes. They created a commission <\/a>that would make it easier to block the opposition from serving in government.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nBut in 2023, Polish voters decided<\/a> Law and Justice was just too extreme, that a country intimately familiar with tyrannical rule<\/a> could not tolerate further erosion of its democracy. Law and Justice won the most votes in the parliamentary election, but it did not have enough allies to form a coalition; the runner-up did. The result was a new ruling coalition of largely establishment parties with classically liberal philosophies \u2014 basically, the opposite of Law and Justice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nIt was, at this point, that the new governing coalition had to ask itself: Now what?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nVoters expected this new government, headed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, to quickly unwind the damage that Law and Justice had inflicted on Poland\u2019s democracy. Just one problem: It\u2019s extremely hard to toss the work of a previous government via legal, democratic means. That means the reach of an authoritarian era can extend far into the next political age of a country.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nPolitical scientist and sociologist Ben Stanley has looked closely at this kind of authoritarian hangover in his work. He\u2019s an associate professor at SWPS University in Warsaw<\/a> and recently published a book with Stanley Bill called Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland\u2019s Illiberal Revolution<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nStanley describes the barriers to reform as a \u201ctrilemma\u201d: Voters want you to reform quickly, legally, and<\/em> effectively, but it\u2019s almost always impossible to achieve all three at the same time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nToday, Explained <\/em>host Noel King spoke to Stanley about his theory and where Poland goes from here.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nTell me about what you call the \u201cilliberal trilemma.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nWell, this was a problem that my co-author Stanley Bill and I started to think about as we were coming to the end of writing our book: How can countries deal with the consequences of a period of illiberalism, a period of democratic backsliding?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nAnd one of the problems that the government has experienced during its two years in power so far is that there are expectations that it will do much to reform what its predecessor implemented: dealing with the rule-of-law problem, dealing with the problem of illegitimately appointed judges, dealing with the consequences of democratic backsliding.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nThe problem that a government that comes to power saying that it will respect liberal democracy faces is that if it wants to do things legally, if it wants to do things by the book, this is a slow process. This is a process which can\u2019t be pushed through in the way that Law and Justice pushed through its own agenda. So, the trilemma essentially is that a government, after a period of illiberal governance, is faced with having to do things legally, with needing to do things quickly, and with needing to do things effectively.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n\n\u201cI think the first thing that Poland can teach pretty much anybody who is going to face dealing with the aftermath of an illiberal government is that it\u2019s not as easy as it might seem at first glance.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\nThe problem is that it can often only choose two of those three things. It can choose either to act in a way which is legal and quick, but it doesn\u2019t really effectively deal with the problem, because there is only a limited impact of the things that it can do legally and quickly. It can choose to act legally and effectively, but this is a long and drawn out process, because it involves things like overcoming presidential vetoes; it involves you dealing with entrenched elites in institutions that were politicized by the predecessor. Or, it can choose to do things quickly and effectively, but at the price of either bending or breaking the law.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nSo, the big question for this government has been: To what extent is the imperative of restoring liberal democracy something that justifies either bending liberal democratic norms and laws or breaking them outright? We have this sort of period of militant democracy where, to restore a broken democracy, we first have to break some of its principles further.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nGive me a concrete example of how you\u2019ve seen this be a problem.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nThe most significant example of this has been with respect to the rule of law and, particularly, the appointment of judges.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nJust to explain what happened: Essentially, under Law and Justice, the body which is responsible for appointing judges, the National Council of the Judiciary, was politicized through changes to the appointment process. Essentially, parliament can now have much more of an impact on who chooses judges and who disciplines judges, which has plenty of consequences for the separation of powers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nSo, when the current government came into power, one of the things that they promised to do was to reform this system, to bring about reforms that would ensure that the system of judicial appointments was not irretrievably politicized. They have to act quickly, because there are illegitimately appointed judges through a politicized process who are ruling on cases, who are having material consequences by sitting as judges.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nThe problem, though, is that, while they have to move quickly, they can\u2019t do so without changing the law as was altered by Law and Justice. So, they need to do this legally, but they can\u2019t do this legally, because they have had first President [Andrzej] Duda and second President [Karol] Nawrocki, the current incumbent, who are blocking them from making these reforms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nSo, while they need to act effectively, and they need to act legally, they can\u2019t do that quickly. If they were to try to act in ways which got around this presidential veto, they would be able to do that swiftly and effectively, because they have a parliamentary majority that could push through the required changes. But they wouldn\u2019t be able to do so legally if they ignored the presidential veto.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nIn order to reform the courts, in order to reform the process of judicial appointments, they\u2019re stuck in this trilemma, because the only things that they can do are either ineffective or slow if they want those things to be legal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nI understand that a very similar dynamic has played out with the media in Poland. Walk me through what happened with the media, why it\u2019s been so hard to reform and what the stakes are of that?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nThe problem starts essentially with public media. And public media in Poland has never been perfect in the sense of being perfectly neutral. It\u2019s always been seen as an institution that successive governments have tried to leave their stamp on in some way to exert some degree of political influence over.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nBut under Law and Justice, this involved a much further going sort of purging of the boards of public media very quickly. It was one of the first things that they did when they came to power in 2015, getting rid of boards of public media and, with that, essentially purging journalists that could be predicted to be negatively oriented towards the Law and Justice government.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nWe saw, over the eight years of Law and Justice\u2019s period in office, that public media became, essentially, a very crude propaganda arm of the executive, simply pushing the government line while actively seeking to disparage and denigrate opposition politicians. So, again, the current government tried to address that almost immediately. Again, one of the first things they did was essentially to use some rather questionable legal methods to remove the board members of public media organizations and replace them with, as they described them, technocrats who were going to bring back pluralism and sort of non-bias in public media.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nYou\u2019re aware of what\u2019s going on in the US right now. You\u2019re aware that we\u2019ve elected a profoundly illiberal government with some really worrying characters. If I were to ask you to compare Poland and the United States, what would you say that Poland could teach us \u2014 whether it\u2019s good, bad, ugly, or somewhere in between?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nWell, I think the first thing that Poland can teach pretty much anybody who is going to face dealing with the aftermath of an illiberal government is that it\u2019s not as easy as it might seem at first glance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nIt isn\u2019t sufficient just to get back into power and expect that you can use the existing institutions to reform things in a liberal direction. One of the problems that has been exposed in Poland, as in the case of the US, is that certain norms have been overturned, things that the expectation was on the part of the political mainstream that people simply wouldn\u2019t do and simply wouldn\u2019t say have been done and said. I think that what can be learned from the Polish case is that once those things have been done and said, it\u2019s very difficult to restore the norms that existed before.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nThere is a standing temptation on the part of anyone who gets into power next to act in similar ways. So, I think that the way in which the norms have shifted in Poland, and what people are willing to accept from politicians \u2014 or at least what people are willing to not resist and not expect consequences for \u2014 has changed quite significantly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nI think that\u2019s one of the things that we\u2019ve faced in the US, as well, where you may have your subsequent Democrat administration who said, \u201cWell, our predecessors did these things and maybe we\u2019re not going to be acting as egregiously as you people like Stephen Miller are acting.\u201d But, on the other hand, it\u2019s clear that the public is willing to accept certain actions that we didn\u2019t think that they would be willing to accept. So, I think that one of the key things that can be learned is that once those norms shift, it affects both sides.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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- In Poland, efforts to restore liberal democracy has meant choosing between slow, lawful reforms and faster moves that risk bending the rules.<\/span><\/li>\n