There Is No Going Back to Pre-Populist Poland

Many observers in the West seem to assume that the victory of the Polish opposition in last weekend’s parliamentary election—the country’s return to liberal democracy after eight years of rule by the increasingly illiberal Law and Justice (PiS) party—will mean a return to the pre-populist era before the PiS came to power. In their minds, a new government under Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk will quickly reverse eight years of right-wing policies, realign Warsaw with its Western partners, and bring Poland back into the happy fold of the European family.

There are at least five reasons why these expectations are overblown, naïve, or simply wrong.

1. Reversing the policies of the last eight years will be a long, arduous, and incomplete process. The Law and Justice party has been systematically deconstructing the liberal democratic state for the past eight years, and repairing the damage could take just as long.

For one, the PiS has placed its people all over the Polish state, media, and other institutions. Even with Tusk as prime minister, Poland’s Constitution gives President Andrzej Duda, a former PiS member, a veto he could use to obstruct the new government’s legislation. Similarly, the PiS has stuffed the Polish Constitutional Tribunal with judges sympathetic to its agenda, and they could also blow up reforms. Finally, the populists have distributed substantial funds to various PiS-aligned organizations that will now attempt to discredit the new government and help the populists regain power. If Tusk, who served as prime minister twice before, takes the helm of government, it will require all his experience to handle this daunting challenge.

2. There is no return to Poland’s pre-2015 role in Europe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has irrevocably shattered the trust Poles might have had in German and French leadership. On the one hand, a government led by Tusk, a former president of the European Council, will put an end to Warsaw’s vicious anti-German and anti-EU propaganda. But an immense skepticism toward European foreign and energy policies—above all, Germany’s—will remain.

The skepticism is justified. Germany’s mistakes in its Russia policies helped pave the road to war. Berlin’s cultivation of its closeness to Moscow, including its policy of increasing its energy dependence on Russia, was one of the reasons Russian President Vladimir Putin felt confident that the West would be divided and not come to Ukraine’s aid. All the while, the Germans were convinced they were morally and strategically right, often lecturing and belittling the Poles and anyone else who dared to warn about the growing threat.

No belated German Zeitenwende can make these essential facts go away. There is no imaginable scenario in which the countries of Central and Eastern Europe return to the old European status quo, in which Germany and France treated them as junior partners. Poland has learned its lesson.

3. Poland will continue to be laser-focused on Russia as an existential security threat. Russian officials have openly stated their intentions to restore Moscow’s Cold War-era empire, just like Putin long ago announced his designs on Ukraine. As much as Tusk has stressed that Poland should restore close ties with Brussels, the fear of a possible war with Russia and the loss, once again, of Polish statehood to Moscow will be a fundamental driver of policy for any government in Warsaw.

Right now, that includes continued arms supplies to Ukraine, a regional security leadership role, and sustained growth of the Polish military. Significant increases in defense spending under the PiS will be maintained. Poland is already on track to spend up to 4 percent of GDP on the military, significantly more than most European countries. On these issues, there is broad consensus in Poland, and any attempts in the EU to water down policies toward Russia will face strong opposition from Warsaw. In this, Poland will be increasingly aligned with a large bloc of EU and NATO members reaching from the Nordic region to the Black Sea.

4. Poland will remain more trans-Atlantic in its outlook than its European partners. Barring a dramatic change in Washington’s commitment to European security, Poland will continue to rely on the United States and NATO. While Warsaw will support greater security coordination with other EU member states, any attempt to dis-align EU defense from NATO will be vigorously opposed, potentially leading to disagreements with France and any other Western European countries pursuing this aim. In a new situation of existential threat, countries near Russia will bet on Washington, not Paris or Berlin.

5. Polish politics will always be more populist. Even now, the PiS is the party with the highest share of votes cast—35 percent. It thus remains a vital part of the Polish political landscape.

But there is a more fundamental reason that Poland will continue to be a country where a nationalist populism plays a greater role than in the countries of Western Europe. As elsewhere, populists base their rhetoric on the fear of losing sovereignty. In Poland and other countries of Eastern and Central Europe, this fear isn’t just a rhetorical talking point but a deep national trauma. In the 20th century, most of these countries were occupied multiple times by foreign powers; some, like Poland and the Baltic States, were completely wiped off the map in their not-so-recent history.

Needless to say, the war in Ukraine has hugely reinforced these collective existential anxieties, which in turn shape new political divisions. Polish populists are pointing not only to Moscow, but have also channeled anxieties over national sovereignty toward Brussels and Berlin. This will not go away.

All this said, anyone who believes in a democratic Poland and sees the country as a vital part of the EU has reason to rejoice. Last weekend, more Poles voted to oust the populist PiS than to remove communism in 1989. The voter turnout was higher, too, indicating not only great concern among Poles about the direction of their country, but the vibrancy of Polish democracy even after eight years of PiS attempts to smother it. In the most brutal and unfair election campaign since the fall of communism, pluralism won. Poland showed the world that an entrenched illiberal regime can be defeated. Hopefully, that will be an example for other European countries like Hungary to follow.