The Guardian: The time for protest is over. Now Poles must build the state

When we apply the shorthand label “illiberal democracy” to Poland it is vital to distinguish between two different things. First, there is the ideological, cultural and policy agenda of the nationalist populist party that won both parliamentary and presidential elections in 2015. This agenda might unkindly be described as systematic anti-liberalism with a seasoning of resentment and paranoia. I don’t like most of this PiS package, but a plurality of those who turned out to vote clearly did prefer it to the alternatives then on offer, and a victorious party has a right to implement its policies.

What it has no right to do is to dismantle or neutralise the institutions that allow an informed public to make that free choice, and that place essential checks and balances on the executive. But this is what has been happening over the last year. I quite often watch Polish public television. Almost overnight, it turned from a slightly dull and only mildly pro-government channel into a PiS propaganda organ. The country’s constitutional court has now been brought effectively under the control of justices close to the ruling party, despite popular protests organised by the Committee for the Defence of Democracy and repeated warnings from Brussels that this violates the EU’s rule of law criteria. [...]

Instead of institutional resilience, Poland has fallen back on its traditional habits of extra-parliamentary protest, with society organising itself in spite of and against the state. Some of these demos have been impressive, especially the so-called “black protests” in which tens of thousands of women, dressed mainly in black, turned out to refuse a proposed Catholic conservative narrowing of the abortion law. But for the most part, when I watch these marches on snowy Polish streets, with the familiar cadences of their chants, and when I hear old Lech Wałęsa say that “patriots must unite” to get rid of PiS by unspecified “clever, attractive and peaceful” means, I laugh with one eye and weep with the other.

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