Lessons from the fall of Poland’s populists

Poland’s populist-authoritarian ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), was trounced in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, receiving just 35.4% of the vote compared to 53.5% for pro-democracy opposition parties. This marks the second important defeat for authoritarian politicians in the West since Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump. The question now is what lessons it might offer for Poland, Europe, and other democracies.As in the 2020 US presidential election, Poland’s election generated record-breaking turnout of 74%, up from 62% in 2019 – the highest since the fall of communism in 1989. Not only did PiS fail to increase its total vote count from the previous election (something Trump managed to do), but the three democratic opposition parties (like Biden) increased their votes by more than 3mn.Although the election was technically free (meaning the votes were properly counted), it definitely was not fair. The deck was stacked so much in PiS’s favour that it would have made Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, proud. Throughout the campaign, the state-controlled TV channel – which commands a viewership of around 3.5mn, accounting for around 40% of the national news audience (of whom several million have no access to other TV channels) – pumped out PiS propaganda around the clock. Meanwhile, state-owned companies, including key utilities, spent as much on pro-PiS campaign ads as PiS itself did.But, unlike in Hungary, Poland’s large cable-news channel, TVN24 (which is owned by the US company Discovery), remained resolutely independent, and another mid-size channel (owned by a Polish billionaire) offered more diverse coverage despite its pro-government bias. At the same time, most Internet and print media remained free, though the state oil monopoly did buy up most of the local press to advocate for PiS.So, what are the lessons? First, the longer that authoritarian rule lasts, the harder it is to end it, because those in power will gradually eliminate independent institutions and centres of influence such as independent media. The chances for a similar reversal in Hungary or Turkiye, where autocratic rule has persisted for more than a decade, are much smaller than in Poland. Had PiS prevailed in this election, it could have consolidated its hold on power for many more terms.Second, electoral systems based on proportional representation (as in Poland) are harder for authoritarian parties to dominate than are "first-past-the-post” winner-take-all systems (as in Hungary and Turkiye). Proportional means proportional, after all, whereas first-past-the-post systems are more susceptible to gerrymandering. While there is still some scope for such manipulation in Poland – that is why PiS won 42% of the Sejm (lower parliament) with only 35% of the votes – it was not enough to guarantee victory. In Hungary, by contrast, Orban has locked in a supermajority, large enough to amend the constitution, with only around half the popular vote.Moreover, first-past-the-post electoral systems tend to polarize voters and raise the stakes of elections, which increasingly come to seem existential to one or both sides. The implication is that if authoritarians gain control of a major party in such a system, they can pose a threat to the broader constitutional order for many decades, as now seems to be happening in the US.One key reason for PiS’s defeat was that Third Way, a party catering to democratically inclined moderate conservatives (the Polish equivalent of never-Trump Republicans), won 65 Sejm seats. Just imagine how different US politics would be if a party led, for example, by Liz Cheney, the staunchly conservative former congresswoman from Wyoming who was ousted for her opposition to Trump, controlled 60 seats in the House of Representatives.If we want to protect our democracies from the menace of authoritarianism, we need to make our electoral systems as proportional as possible, even if that leads to greater political fragmentation. When PiS won a majority of parliamentary seats in 2015 with only 38% of the vote, it was because threshold requirements had excluded parties that together had garnered some 16% of the vote.In Weimar Germany at the height of the Great Depression, when unemployment was at 30%, the Nazis were stymied from winning a majority by the country’s proportional-representation system. Only by staging a coup after the Reichstag fire were they able to consolidate absolute power. Looking ahead, pro-democratic forces in the US should advocate two-round voting systems (of the kind that Georgia has for US races) as a substitute for party primaries. Likewise, in Poland, thresholds for entering parliament should be radically reduced to 1%.A third lesson is that pro-democracy forces not only must offer diversity to voters; they also must increase turnout. That is what former Polish prime minister and European Council President Donald Tusk did this year with a relentless eight-month campaign that involved holding 3-4 public meetings every week across PiS’s rural strongholds. While Third Way offered a somewhat softer face to the disenchanted, Tusk offered red meat to all those Poles who favour democracy.Finally, we must not forget that the populist-authoritarian threat pervades the West. That means the democratic response to it must be equally wide ranging. In Europe, the new Polish government needs to do away with the protective umbrella that PiS has been holding over Orban by effectively vetoing key EU enforcement actions against rule-of-law violations in Hungary. Proceedings against Orban under Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union should be revived without delay, and Hungary should be stripped of its EU voting rights until it re-establishes a properly functioning democratic order. Elections – even in other countries – must be seen to have consequences. – Project Syndicatel Jacek Rostowski is a former minister of finance and deputy prime minister of Poland.