In a rare case of good news in the world, the moderates defeat the authoritarians in Poland’s election
Amid every kind of misery around the world, a ray of light arrives from Poland, where the authoritarians appear to have been shown the door in Sunday’s pivotal election. That should offer comfort to people all over the world who believe in a liberal, democratic, rules-based, rational world order.
As we have written on these pages, the Law and Justice party in Poland deserves credit – quotation-marks “credit” – for being on the vanguard of the global authoritarian project, first coming to power in 2005 and quickly stamping out the shambolic version of good karma represented by Lech Walesa.
It was headed by the Kaczynski brothers, a very different Lech (who first served as president and was killed in a plane crash in 2010) and Jaroslaw — twins straight out of Twin Peaks. They immediately set about dismantling the liberalism of the early years of post-Communism, eviscerating the judiciary and riling up the conservative countryside with the now-familiar populist agitations via a media they tried to control with bureaucratic manipulations and crony ownerships.
But they did not go so far as to rig Sunday’s election. For that they deserve a modicum of real credit, without quotation marks. That is not the modus operandi of Vladimir Putin in poor Russia, or even, probably, Viktor Orban in Hungary.
There are two good things about the election. First, turnout was the highest in the post-communist era with almost three-quarters of eligible voters showing up. That shows the people noticed what had happened, and still had faith in people power. And second, according to exit polls the three opposition parties won a combined 248 seats in the 460-seat lower house of parliament, the Sejm.
The largest of the groups is Civic Coalition, led by former prime minister and former European Union president Donald Turk, which appears to have won about 32% of votes. Law and Justice won slightly more votes, but that means nothing in a system that requires a majority in parliament, as long as the fractured opposition is united when it counts. Tusk said he was delighted to “come in second” in this fashion.
A government led by Tusk (pictured above) and his allies can be expected to reverse the actions of Law and Justice and to reinstate proper democracy in Poland. That will be a sign to people in other countries that have teetered on the edge of democracy and even tipped over, like Hungary and Turkey, that there is a way back.
It will also be noted by the authoritarians in Israel, represented by the coalition of Benjamin Netanyahu. They are already reeling from the war they blundered into with Hamas by taking they eye off the ball with an ill-conceived and genuinely shocking so-called “judicial reform” which was actually a Putinization. The Poland developments will also help nudge the Jewish state back from the fake-democracy abyss.
And, of course, it is an important data point for the increasingly anti-democratic Republican Party in the United States. More on that, obviously, in the perilous months ahead.
Is It Too Late for Poland to Turn Back to Democracy? We’ll Find Out Sunday
