The thing about elected authoritarians is that they sometimes lose elections. Such was the case in 2023 with Poland’s Law and Justice party.
- After a period of democratic backsliding, governments that want to restore democratic rule face an “illiberal trilemma”: They seek to unwind authoritarian rule legally, quickly, and effectively — but it’s very difficult to achieve all three.
- In Poland, efforts to restore liberal democracy has meant choosing between slow, lawful reforms and faster moves that risk bending the rules.
- The lesson for countries like the US is that once democratic norms are broken, they’re hard to rebuild — and the temptation to stretch those norms doesn’t disappear when power changes hands.
The 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’s constitutional courts with loyalists — judges who would rubber stamp laws, even if their constitutionality was questionable. They took over a largely independent public media and bent it to conservative extremes. They created a commission that would make it easier to block the opposition from serving in government.
But in 2023, Polish voters decided Law and Justice was just too extreme, that a country intimately familiar with tyrannical rule 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 — basically, the opposite of Law and Justice.
It was, at this point, that the new governing coalition had to ask itself: Now what?
Voters expected this new government, headed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, to quickly unwind the damage that Law and Justice had inflicted on Poland’s democracy. Just one problem: It’s 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.
Political scientist and sociologist Ben Stanley has looked closely at this kind of authoritarian hangover in his work. He’s an associate professor at SWPS University in Warsaw and recently published a book with Stanley Bill called Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland’s Illiberal Revolution.
Stanley describes the barriers to reform as a “trilemma”: Voters want you to reform quickly, legally, and effectively, but it’s almost always impossible to achieve all three at the same time.
Today, Explained host Noel King spoke to Stanley about his theory and where Poland goes from here.
Tell me about what you call the “illiberal trilemma.”
Well, 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?
And 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.
The 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’t 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.
“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’s not as easy as it might seem at first glance.”
The 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’t 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.
So, 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.
Give me a concrete example of how you’ve seen this be a problem.
The most significant example of this has been with respect to the rule of law and, particularly, the appointment of judges.
Just 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.
So, 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.
The problem, though, is that, while they have to move quickly, they can’t do so without changing the law as was altered by Law and Justice. So, they need to do this legally, but they can’t 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.
So, while they need to act effectively, and they need to act legally, they can’t 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’t be able to do so legally if they ignored the presidential veto.
In order to reform the courts, in order to reform the process of judicial appointments, they’re 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.
I understand that a very similar dynamic has played out with the media in Poland. Walk me through what happened with the media, why it’s been so hard to reform and what the stakes are of that?
The problem starts essentially with public media. And public media in Poland has never been perfect in the sense of being perfectly neutral. It’s 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.
But 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.
We saw, over the eight years of Law and Justice’s 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.
You’re aware of what’s going on in the US right now. You’re aware that we’ve 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 — whether it’s good, bad, ugly, or somewhere in between?
Well, 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’s not as easy as it might seem at first glance.
It isn’t 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’t do and simply wouldn’t 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’s very difficult to restore the norms that existed before.
There 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 — or at least what people are willing to not resist and not expect consequences for — has changed quite significantly.
I think that’s one of the things that we’ve faced in the US, as well, where you may have your subsequent Democrat administration who said, “Well, our predecessors did these things and maybe we’re not going to be acting as egregiously as you people like Stephen Miller are acting.” But, on the other hand, it’s clear that the public is willing to accept certain actions that we didn’t 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.
