Rule 8: Keep going: Many great victories for democracy started from a place of “this is impossible.” Speak out even when — perhaps, especially when — it takes courage to do so. Take calculated risks. Regroup if needed. Recharge.
If you are still able to speak out, that means there is still democratic space to act. If you are still able to cast a vote that will count, even if the playing field is tilted, there is still an opening to change the trajectory of the country. Take advantage of the democratic opportunities that still exist — whether in the voting booth or the public square — otherwise, they may disappear.
Everyone has a role to play in protecting democracy, rebuilding what might have been lost, and dreaming up an even better future. Keep going.
Leading up to Poland’s 2023 elections, it looked like the autocratic Law and Justice party (PiS) had a good chance of holding onto power — perhaps indefinitely. For eight years, PiS aimed to entrench its rule by undermining the country’s courts, media, and other independent institutions. Beginning in 2015, the ruling party presided over the “swiftest democratic decline” in Europe.
But those fighting to reverse the autocratic tide kept going. Despite PiS’s attempts to silence its critics, there was still space for pro-democracy Poles to speak out against the government. And they refused to accept the inevitability of PiS’s power grabs.
Years of mobilization by civil society and the opposition laid the groundwork for a pro-democracy coalition to emerge in the run-up to the 2023 elections. Those opposed to PiS’s overreach organized in defense of democracy.
And they won.
But restoring democracy hasn’t been easy. Setbacks stemming from years of PiS’s entrenched rule have frustrated those hoping for a total democratic renewal.
The story of Poland’s democratic comeback serves as a reminder that where there’s space for resistance, there’s room to slow autocratic consolidation and reverse the effects of democratic breakdown. And if voters eventually return the pro-democracy coalition to power, its leaders (and supporters) must remain resilient and clear-eyed in their approach. Governing well and addressing the demands of the public insulate against the possibility of an autocratic resurgence. The stakes are too high to get things wrong.
For eight years, PiS aimed to remake Poland’s institutions
After PiS’s victory in the 2015 parliamentary elections, party leaders wasted no time following the playbook that Viktor Orbán had successfully deployed in Hungary five years earlier. The party’s powerful leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, previewed as much when he vowed to create “Budapest in Warsaw” in a nod to PiS’s shared autocratic ambitions.
The PiS government quickly politicized the country’s public media and civil service. Lacking the parliamentary supermajority required to formally rewrite the constitution, PiS officials instead disregarded legal norms and manipulated existing laws to consolidate power.
Perhaps most consequential of PiS’s power grabs was its years-long effort to take over Poland’s courts.
Almost immediately, PiS moved to defang and then co-opt the Constitutional Tribunal, which reviews the constitutionality of legislation enacted by parliament. Frustrated by the prospect of the tribunal slowing PiS’s illiberal agenda, Kaczyński deemed it “the bastion of everything in Poland that is bad.”
Within a month of taking office, PiS moved to dismiss five judges appointed to the tribunal by the previous government in order to replace them with loyalists. When the tribunal issued an injunction to put an end to the ruling party’s lawlessness, both parliament and the PiS-aligned president, Andrzej Duda, ignored the order and pushed through the new judges anyway.
After PiS enacted additional legislation that empowered these newly installed judges, the tribunal again struck down the apparent power grab. But the government simply refused to publish the tribunal’s decision — ushering in an era of rule by law, rather than rule of law.
However, public resistance to the ruling party’s blatant assault on the judiciary grew as civil society groups organized mass demonstrations across the country. And less than two months after PiS’s 2015 election victory, thousands took to the streets of Poland’s capital with a clear message: “This is Warsaw, not Budapest.”
Still, PiS pushed through its autocratic agenda
As the ruling party approached one year in power, it aimed to quash any remaining levers of accountability. The rubber-stamp parliament passed new laws that required the Constitutional Tribunal to assign cases to PiS-appointed judges and guaranteed that a party loyalist would serve as the court’s next president. PiS also weaponized the state apparatus to smear judges appointed by the previous government and undermine the process of judicial review.
Taken together, these maneuvers amounted to a massive consolidation of power.
Still, pro-democracy advocates and civil society groups continued to mobilize against PiS’s overreach and the more controversial parts of its policy agenda.
In October 2016, tens of thousands marched against the government’s proposed total abortion ban. Ultimately, coordinated opposition efforts forced PiS to step back from the legislation — its first major public retreat since taking office. But in typical autocratic fashion, the government also responded with new legislation designed to suppress any future dissent.
Instead of backing down, thousands mobilized to mark the 35th anniversary of martial law in Poland (during which the former communist regime aimed to crush the anti-authoritarian Solidarity movement). In the spirit of Solidarity, Poland’s pro-democracy coalition continued to build a big tent to counter the illiberal PiS government.
Read more: Lessons from the global history of labor movements.
Nonetheless, the government’s attacks on the rule of law accelerated. In 2017, PiS proposed a sweeping restructuring of both the Supreme Court and the National Council of the Judiciary, which effectively forced mandatory retirement for judges appointed by the previous government and put the judicial nomination process under direct PiS control.
Once again, large scale mobilization ensued. In a temporary retreat, President Duda vetoed the retirement law. But the following year, the ruling party enacted a modified version of the same legislation — only to reverse course amid sustained pressure from the country’s growing pro-democracy coalition.
And although PiS secured its majority in parliament’s lower house in the 2019 elections, the ruling party actually lost its majority in the upper house.
Despite the authoritarian party’s omnipresence, small wins notched along the way reminded pro-democracy actors to take advantage of opportunities for building resilience. Because they recognized that those small wins could eventually build toward something bigger.
Continued attacks on the rule of law soon met the strength of a growing pro-democracy movement
Following the 2019 elections, PiS launched new attacks on judicial independence. A “muzzle law” prohibited judges from questioning the ruling party, and new disciplinary procedures were enacted to punish judges who stepped out of line.
But pro-democracy Poles were ready to mobilize. In early 2020, thousands of judges joined the “March of 1,000 Robes,” taking a stand against the ruling party’s power grabs. Civil society groups, law professors, and opposition leaders also played a role in this impressive show of strength, which helped draw attention to PiS’s increasingly authoritarian tactics and highlighted the potential of Poland’s pro-democracy coalition.
Later that year, PiS faced another massive wave of public backlash. When the co-opted Constitutional Tribunal severely restricted reproductive rights, hundreds of thousands took to the streets in Poland’s largest demonstrations since the fall of communism. With its ruling, the captured tribunal helped PiS achieve a long-standing policy goal. But in doing so, it also energized Poland’s burgeoning pro-democracy opposition movement.
For years, PiS officials engaged in a delicate balancing act between consolidating enough power to entrench their rule, while also avoiding the kinds of overreach that could spark major domestic backlash. Autocrats around the world contend with this same dilemma — namely, how to aggrandize their power without crossing a line that could cost them in the long run.
Though the next election was still three years away, the momentum from 2020 laid the foundation for what would become a unified pro-democracy coalition to take on PiS at the ballot box.
The 2023 campaign changed everything
The mass mobilization of civil society in 2020 — combined with a growing political opposition — influenced the pro-democracy Civic Coalition (KO) led by former prime minister Donald Tusk. The big-tent KO brought together parties across the ideological spectrum and was united by one goal: defeating PiS in the 2023 parliamentary elections.
The parties under the KO umbrella made it a point to embrace collaboration, while still holding onto their ideological distinctions that could help attract a broad range of voters. If, for instance, an anti-PiS voter was skeptical of Tusk, they had other options to turn to within the pro-democracy coalition.
Throughout the campaign, Tusk and his allies barnstormed the country, delivering an explicitly pro-democracy message that reached voters disillusioned by the government’s autocratic overreach. And the exposé of a massive corruption scheme involving PiS cronies helped bring more voters into the KO camp during the final weeks of the campaign.
Despite legal efforts by the ruling party to sideline Tusk and his allies, record voter turnout, particularly among women and young people, propelled KO to victory. Following a campaign that was neither free nor fair, the pro-democracy opposition still won enough seats to form a majority coalition government.
As Protect Democracy’s Ian Bassin and Ben Raderstorf wrote at the time, “the pro-democracy coalition won by being a pro-democracy coalition.”
Bottom line: keep going
Since taking office, Tusk’s government has set out to undo almost a decade of democratic backsliding. But turning the tide has come with its own challenges.
Throughout their winning campaign, KO promised to “de-PiSify” the Polish state. Expectations were understandably high.
But here’s the thing: KO didn’t come into office with total power. PiS still held the co-opted judiciary and, even more importantly, the presidency. Under Poland’s parliamentary system, the prime minister functions as the country’s chief executive, but the president still has the power to block (and propose) legislation, which can lead to gridlock when the two offices are held by leaders backed by different parties (as has been the case since 2023).
Though KO has been successful in some areas — like reasserting media independence and removing PiS holdovers from the bureaucracy — undoing the former government’s attacks on the judiciary has yielded more mixed results.
After KO gained power, President Duda (a PiS stalwart) wielded his veto power to block the new government’s reform agenda. He halted legislation aimed at de-politicizing the judiciary by placing it under review by the Constitutional Tribunal itself, effectively torpedoing Tusk’s efforts to restore judicial independence. And without the three-fifths parliamentary majority required to overturn presidential vetoes, Tusk’s coalition has been hamstrung at nearly every turn.
At the same time, the KO government continues to ignore rulings issued by the Constitutional Tribunal, which is made up entirely of judges illegitimately appointed by PiS. And recent court rulings have raised more questions about the 2,500 “neo-judges” installed by the former government, as KO officials continue to propose new judicial reforms.
Tusk and his governing partners have also struggled to liberalize Poland’s strict abortion laws and restore civil liberties that were undermined during the PiS era. As a result, many of the voters who carried the pro-democracy coalition to victory in 2023 have grown disillusioned.
The results of the presidential contest earlier this year reflect those frustrations. The PiS-backed candidate, Karol Nawrocki, was swept into office as many KO voters from 2023 registered their disappointment at the polls. Tusk and his allies now face the prospect of continued gridlock for the remainder of their term in office.
Still, Nawrocki’s narrow victory hasn’t marked the end of Poland’s democratic resurgence. Rather than signaling the public’s preference for PiS’s illiberalism, the presidential election results might have actually highlighted a desire for even greater pro-democracy change. The contest was largely a referendum on KO’s record, and the government failed to mobilize voters who were frustrated with its inability to restore judicial independence and deliver on other key parts of its 2023 policy platform.
In the aftermath of Nawrocki’s win, Anne Applebaum reminded onlookers that creeping authoritarianism “cannot easily be defeated or dismissed in one electoral cycle.”
The story of Poland’s democratic comeback is still being written. Starting in 2015, pro-democracy forces organized, adapted, and mobilized, ultimately building the coalition that defeated the autocratic ruling party in 2023. From civil society organizations to judges and formerly disaffected voters, support for restoring Poland’s democracy grew even as PiS tightened its grip.
Poland is not alone in its democratic U-turn. More than 70% of countries that have experienced democratic breakdown over the past 30 years have ultimately resisted authoritarianism. And over 90% have either restored or improved their democracies following a period of backsliding.
So the fight continues. Similar to many of its counterparts around the world, Poland’s pro-democracy coalition still needs to win over hearts and minds and prepare for the long (and sometimes messy) process to get democracy back on track.
The lesson from Poland is clear: Especially in moments of uncertainty, keep going to protect democracy.
Thank you for reading along as we’ve shared the eight stories in our Democracy Atlas series. If you missed any, here are the eight rules of anti-authoritarianism we’ve laid out over the past few months:
Rule five: Show — don’t tell — how things work and what is trustworthy (Nigeria)
Rule six: Remember: Autocrats are not invincible. But be careful (Zimbabwe)
Rule eight: Keep going (Poland)
We’re not quite done yet, though! Next week we’re going to host an open discussion on the series, the lessons, and how to apply all these rules to the U.S. context. I hope you’ll join us for that conversation.
Let us know in the comments whether and how this series has been useful. Like many of the cases we’ve explored, our own democratic story is still being written. Hopefully the shared experiences of pro-democracy voices around the world can help us navigate any uncertainty that still lies ahead.
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Very glad I found your stack. I look forward to reading the entire series. I appreciate the clear recounting of how political landscapes develop and change, for both good and bad. You manage a fine balance between the need for persisting in hope and hard work while honestly acknowledging complexity and difficulty and delays in achieving results. Thank you for your insights.
These stories are extremely encouraging