A tragic turnaround in Poland
THE dire warning issued by the departing president of Poland’s highest constitutional court was one that should frighten not only the Poles, but people of all democratic nations in which populist rulers have taken or threaten to take power. Andrzej Rzeplinski, whose term expired on Monday, said that the governing Law and Justice Party is systematically weakening the checks and balances provided by the courts, the press and other institutions, and is leading the country “on the road to autocracy”.
Once the model of post-Communist transition to democracy, Poland has taken a sharp swing backward. The “reforms” enacted by the nationalist, right-wing Law and Justice Party, which won a majority in Parliament in October 2015, have strengthened the power of the executive branch over the news media, state prosecutors and nongovernmental organisations, and have undermined the independence of the constitutional court. Most recently, the government has cracked down on public gatherings.
In protest, hundreds of thousands of Poles have taken to the streets, creating a political crisis. Opposition legislators have occupied Parliament chambers, while the government has temporarily banned the news media from covering the tumult inside.
The court, which rules on the constitutionality of legislation and government actions, has been from the outset a major target of Law and Justice and its leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who holds no office but wields the real power. He has called the court “the bastion of everything in Poland that is bad” for obstructing what he sees as the popular will as interpreted and expressed by him and his party. The government’s latest assault on the court has been a series of laws that would weaken its oversight role.
Such disdain for the rule of law and basic civil rights has drawn anguished criticism not only from Rzeplinski and other Polish democrats – including Lech Walesa, the hero of Poland’s anti-Communist movement in the 1980s – but also from the European Commission, the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. On Wednesday, the European Commis- sion, the executive body of the European Union, ordered Poland to scrap the changes to the court, although stopping short of calling for punitive sanctions. None of this has swayed Kaczynski, whose first stint in power a decade ago alongside his twin brother, Lech, who was killed in a plane crash in Russia in 2010, failed to advance his nationalist agenda.
As Walesa has noted, authoritarianism is a serious threat to democracy beyond Poland. Populist leaders, whether of the far right or the far left, have made major advances across Europe and in the United States, drawing on a widespread sense of alienation, discontent with ruling elites and anti-globalisation and anti-immigration views.
In nearly every case, whatever their specific agendas, populist leaders claim to represent the will of “the people,” and therefore believe they are empowered to ride roughshod over any person, institution or law that gets in their way. That kind of thinking led to the terrible dictatorships of the 20th century, a fact that becomes more relevant by the day.