openDemocracy: Poland is moving further towards autocracy

For many years after the collapse of communism Poland's political landscape was characterised by consensus. But consensual politics frayed in the mid-2000s and gave way to contention between two main political parties, PiS and Civic Platform. The rivalry of these two parties has fostered polarisation in Poland. Since 2015, when PiS won an outright majority in parliamentary elections and when Duda first became President, PiS has aggressively pursued its policy agenda (including troubling reforms to the judiciary, anti-abortion measures, and politically targeting LGBTQ individuals), pushing Poland's liberal democracy toward conservative autocracy. In turn, the government's actions have stoked the fires of polarisation. [...]

What about when polarisation gets ratcheted up? The PiS government has been marked by politicisation of gender equality and regression for LGBTQ Poles. Quite often, actions in these areas have been justified on political bases with few appeals to biblical canon or Catholic dogma. Nevertheless, Poland's Catholic establishment (chiefly, the Polish Episcopal Conference) and religious conservative voters endorse and take succour from PiS's reactionary measures. Resultantly, Poland is among the most polarised countries in the EU along religious and gender and sexual orientation dimensions. [...]

Events following President Duda's re-election, such as the arrest of an LGBT activist and resultant protests as well as the persistence of so-called 'LGBT free zones' in several Polish towns, have signaled the continuation of polarisation trends. As long as PiS retains its control of governing authority – which it will do at the national level for at least three more years, until the November 2023 parliamentary elections – polarisation is a useful strategy that allows the party to pursue its conservative autocratic agenda. The liberal opponents of PiS are left to pursue resistance through collective action and to build resilience in local communities.

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The Guardian: In Poland we've become spectators at the dismantling of democracy

 International attention may be focused on Belarus, but in Poland, ministers have just announced an autumn agenda which involves a simultaneous attack on the judiciary and the independent media. It coincides with intensifying pressure on the LGBT+ community in the form of verbal assaults from PiS figures. Demonstrations in cities across the country against the pre-trial jailing of an LGBT+ activist have led not to dialogue, but to the heavy-handed arrests of dozens more. [...]

So why was Duda apologising? Some observers assumed that he wanted to signal a genuine change, a wish to heal the polarisation in Polish society. In our view, Duda’s words carried less the spirit of Gandhi than Oscar Wilde, whose advice was to always forgive one’s enemies, because “nothing annoys them so much”. [...]

The phenomenon applies as much to Donald Trump, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Thierry Baudet, the leader of the populist Forum for Democracy in the Netherlands. Essentially, it means that the media becomes a theatre for an ongoing performance aimed at capturing and keeping the audience’s attention. [...]

And the populists’ strategic use of entertainment to win poses a fundamental challenge to defenders of liberal democracy. Calling populists “fascists” and “authoritarians” stopped making an impression on voters long ago. However justified, it became repetitive, uninteresting and therefore, unfortunately, ineffective. If liberal democrats don’t learn about the power of spectacle in the era of dopamine politics, they will fade into irrelevance. And if populism is about creating a spectacle that depicts liberal democracy falling apart, liberalism must provide an alternative spectacle.

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Notes from Poland: “No apologies, no shame”: the rise of Poland’s guerrilla LGBT activists

Various legal efforts have been made by LGBT groups to stop the vans, but have largely been unsuccessful, due to the fact that Poland’s laws against hateful and offensive speech do not cover sexual orientation or gender identity.

Although a court in Gdańsk ordered Fundacja Pro to temporarily stop using some of the slogans it claims are based on “scientific” evidence, another judge in Wrocław rejected a case against the organisation, saying that its activities are “informative”. [...]

Speaking with Notes from Poland shortly before her latest detention, Margot explained what she calls the groups’ “no apologies” approach. They have sought to “throw off the discourse of docility and shame” that she associates with the respectability politics of more moderate members of the LGBT movement. But this radicalism does not exist in a vacuum; it has “adapted to the growth of homophobia”. [...]

For some, the insult to religious feeling was a step too far; others questioned the wisdom of strategies that make LGBT people standout, preferring campaigns that present them as “normal people”. One interviewee said they should be looking for issues that they have in common with religion, such as the idea of love.

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Social Europe: Poles apart—the presidential election in Poland

Anxiety about this election proved a great mobiliser: turnout reached 68 per cent, unseen in Poland since the mid-1990s. The result revealed the extent of the polarisation of Polish society, most manifest in the distribution of support for the two candidates who met in the second round. Both received more than 10 million votes and the outcome was determined by a mere 420,000 ballots.

The most important factors distinguishing these two groups of voters were age, education and place of residence. In a nutshell, younger and better-educated voters, living in the metropoles and other cities, chose Trzaskowski. Older citizens from rural areas, pensioners and farmers, as also the unemployed, chose Duda. [...]

Poles abroad also played a significant role in this election. Not only did their voter turnout vary around 80 per cent but Trzaskowski won a vast majority of their votes (74 per cent). There was however a big difference in voter preferences between the Polish communities in the EU and in north America and post-Soviet countries, where Duda was an unquestionable leader, most probably thanks to a new course in the foreign policy of the national-conservative government.

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Politico: What Poland tells us about the fight against populism

Trzaskowski's defeat is a reminder that running a slick, progressive campaign is not enough to prevail over a state apparatus controlled by populists.

Duda eked out a victory, paving the way for the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party to pursue its authoritarian agenda until the next nationwide ballot in 2023. Given how narrow Duda’s victory was, the party is very likely to accelerate its attempts to take over the judiciary, destroy any remaining independent media and subjugate local governments that don’t toe the party line.

These election results are a death blow to Poland’s liberal democracy. To those fighting populism around the world, they should also be a cautionary tale. [...]

Fundamentally, Trzaskowski failed to realize just how deeply right-wing populism has altered the political landscape and that he cannot hope to come to power without making a meaningful compromise with the other side of the debate. [...]

Nothing was more damaging to Trzaskowski’s prospects than the grotesquely misguided independent campaign of a centrist Catholic TV presenter, Szymon Hołownia, who ran on a vague promise to end the “Polish-Polish war” between PiS and Trzaskowski’s Civic Platform.

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Five takeaways from the Polish presidential election

Experts said prior to the election it was a vote between two different visions of Poland. "This is, of course, a win, but in a psychological and social sense it is not a triumph," said Ewa Marciniak, a political scientist at the University of Warsaw. The election also saw a generational divide, she added, with young voters supporting Trzaskowski and older voters supporting Duda. [...]

LGBT rights were a key divisive point between the two presidential candidates, with Duda promising to protect families from the "LGBT ideology", stating it was more dangerous than communism. [...]

"It's an irony that, in an election where many see a negative development for democracy moving forward, such a sign of democratic health like high participation took place. But high participation is not a neutral development, it also carries political implications," said Angelos Chryssogelos, a lecturer in Politics and International Relations at London Metropolitan University

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Center for Research on Extremism: The Polish Presidential Election 2020: which role does far-right politics (not) play?

In 2015, Duda won the election after a dynamic campaign which tactically downplayed cultural conflicts, promised a new attentive political style, and called for conciliation among Poles. After PiS gained full power, President Duda’s term was marked by contributing to the government’s illiberal dismantlement of democratic checks and balances.

Since at least 2019, Law and Justice refocused on nativist anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric which it had already copied from the far-right League of Polish Families during the first PiS government 2005-07. In 2019, PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński described progressive-liberal values and specifically ‘LGBT ideology’ as threatening to the Polish state, nation and collective identity, in effect demonising LGBTIQ persons. [...]

Konfederacja Wolność I Niepodległość (Confederation Liberty and Independence) founded in 2019 is an amalgam of diverse far-right actors. Their programmatic supply includes Poland’s transformation into an ethnocracy embodying a mythicized, culturally homogenous nation built around traditionalist-Catholic principles contrasted against universal rights and value pluralism; nativist and anti-Semitic tropes; radical pro-market positions such as abolishing obligatory social security contributions and income tax; as well as anti-systemic stances. In the presidential election, Bosak won 6.8% of vote, a result comparable to Konfederacja’s 2019 parliamentary election breakthrough. [...]

Shaping the run-off as a contest over (roughly 2.9 per cent total) abstaining/undeclared far-right voters might turn out to be a tactical double-edged sword. First, Duda has reached an electoral ceiling and might be forced to walk the tightrope between catch-all moderate and radical politics. Second, similar to the anti-systemic electorate of Paweł Kukiz in 2015, many far-right voters might in the end abstain. Third, focusing on economic narratives owned by the far right is likely to backfire on KO, as there is more to be lost on the already acquired center-left vote. Fourth, the more relevant question seems to be whether Trzaskowski will mobilize first round abstainers and the electorate of publicist and TV host Szymon Hołownia. Hołownia who secured 13.9% of vote has run on an ‘anti-political centrist’ platform. With his comparably moderate conservative stance, Hołownia’s active support for Trzaskowski is more likely to be pivotal. The fact that Hołownia was strongly supported by former abstainers adds further potential to mobilize additional new voters in the run-off, usually characterized by higher turnout. This strategy is much more straightforward for the pluralist opposition, but could require more than just reluctant declaration of endorsement by Hołownia, as well as a stronger focus on a ‘Macron-like’ counter-political style by Trzaskowski – with all the potential and risks behind promises of profound change.

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