Poland voted today in an election that may end eight years of government by the conservative Law and Justice party, or PiS. PiS remains the largest individual party, winning roughly 35% of the vote according to the developing results and exit polling, but that is unlikely to be enough to govern. Three opposition groupings, Donald Tusk’s centrist Civic Coalition, the Third Way alliance and the Left, appear collectively to have won enough seats to construct a parliamentary majority. Turnout has reached roughly 74%, apparently the highest level in Poland’s democratic history since the fall of communism. The result is therefore not simply a change in party support. It may become a test of whether democratic erosion can be reversed through the democratic institutions that survived it.
Since taking power in 2015, PiS has transformed important parts of the Polish state while arguing that it was democratising institutions previously dominated by liberal elites. Its governments changed the structure of judicial appointments, clashed repeatedly with the European Union over judicial independence, expanded government influence over public media and pursued a socially conservative political programme centred on nationalism, Catholic identity and family policy. Critics describe this as democratic backsliding. PiS argues that many of its reforms were legitimate exercises of authority by governments repeatedly elected by Polish voters.
That disagreement contains the central difficulty in discussing democratic erosion. Governments do not become undemocratic simply because they change institutions their opponents prefer. Elections are supposed to produce policy consequences. If voters elect a conservative government promising judicial reform, the government possesses some democratic authority to pursue reform. The relevant question is whether those reforms change what government does or increasingly change whether government can later be removed.
That distinction is fundamental.
A government lowering taxes changes policy.
A government weakening independent electoral administration changes the conditions under which future governments are selected.
A government reforming court procedures may be ordinary politics.
A government making judges systematically dependent on the governing party can alter the institutions capable of constraining that party.
Democratic backsliding therefore often occurs not when governments abolish elections but when they change the ecosystem surrounding elections sufficiently that incumbency becomes progressively harder to challenge.
Poland has not reached the endpoint of that process, and today’s election demonstrates why analytical precision matters. Opposition parties remained capable of organising nationally, citizens voted in enormous numbers and the governing party appears capable of losing its parliamentary majority. Calling Poland a dictatorship would therefore erase the genuine political competition that has just produced a potentially transformative result.
At the same time, the existence of competitive elections does not prove every institution surrounding them remained equally healthy.
Democratic quality exists on a spectrum.
A country can remain electoral while courts, media and administrative institutions become increasingly politicised. The important question is whether enough independent institutions survive that voters retain the practical capacity to remove government.
Today’s turnout suggests Polish citizens understood the stakes. Participation appears to have exceeded even the historic 1989 election associated with the collapse of communist rule. High turnout should not automatically be romanticised because participation itself does not tell us which political position is correct. It does demonstrate unusually intense public engagement with the question of who should control the state.
This is one reason elections function as information aggregation mechanisms. Opinion polls, protests and media debates provide signals about political preferences, but elections force millions of individual choices into one institutional outcome. PiS retains a substantial constituency. The opposition collectively appears larger. Both pieces of information matter.
The result should therefore not be interpreted as Poland collectively rejecting everything PiS represents. Roughly a third of voters still supported it, making PiS by far one of the country’s most important political forces. A democratic transition requires recognising those voters as legitimate participants rather than treating them as obstacles to democratic restoration.
This will be one of the opposition’s first tests.
Parties campaigning to protect liberal democracy can become surprisingly illiberal when they believe their opponents themselves threaten democracy. If Tusk’s coalition concludes that PiS spent eight years capturing institutions, it will face enormous pressure to remove PiS-appointed officials, restructure public media and reverse judicial changes rapidly.
Some institutional reversal may be necessary.
The danger lies in method.
If PiS politicised an institution by replacing independent officials with loyalists, simply replacing those loyalists with people loyal to the new government does not restore independence. It changes which political coalition benefits from dependence.
This is the difference between institutional restoration and institutional revenge.
Restoration creates rules that would remain acceptable if PiS returned to power later.
Revenge creates rules that help the current winners because the previous government did the same.
The veil-of-ignorance test becomes particularly useful here. Tusk’s coalition should design judicial and media institutions as though PiS will govern again in four years. PiS should evaluate those reforms as though it expects to return democratically rather than assuming any reduction of its current institutional influence constitutes persecution.
Rules become genuinely neutral when both sides can imagine losing under them.
That is difficult after years of polarisation because political actors accumulate grievances. Every controversial appointment becomes justification for another appointment. Every procedural escalation creates precedent for counter-escalation.
Democratic erosion can therefore become ratcheted.
One government stretches a norm.
The next government inherits the expanded power and uses it for a different purpose.
Each side says the other started it.
Eventually nobody wants to disarm institutionally because unilateral restraint appears strategically naive.
This resembles an arms race.
Both parties may prefer independent institutions in principle while fearing that surrendering political control will allow the opponent to capture them again later.
Repair therefore requires credible commitment from political rivals who do not trust one another.
Courts are particularly difficult because judges need independence from elected governments while judicial appointments inevitably involve political institutions somewhere in the process. No appointment system removes politics completely.
The objective is distributing authority sufficiently that no single temporary majority can convert the judiciary into an extension of itself.
This requires procedures, professional norms and often supermajority or cross-institutional involvement.
It is slower than simply replacing everyone.
Slowness is sometimes the safeguard.
Public media presents a similar problem. PiS has been accused of transforming state television into a highly partisan instrument supporting the government. A new coalition will understandably want to change management and editorial structures.
But “making public media neutral” is easier to promise than define.
Every government believes coverage hostile to it contains bias.
The stronger reform would therefore reduce the government’s ability to control public broadcasting regardless of which party governs, rather than merely changing the political orientation of the people running it.
Institutional independence means accepting that an institution may criticise you.
That is the part governments usually dislike.
The European Union will also play a major role in the transition. Brussels has withheld billions of euros in pandemic-recovery funds amid disputes over Polish judicial reforms and has pursued rule-of-law proceedings against Warsaw. A Tusk-led government would probably improve relations with EU institutions considerably.
That could unlock substantial economic benefits.
It also creates a political risk.
PiS can argue that Brussels rewards governments it ideologically prefers and punishes conservative governments elected by Polish citizens. If EU funds flow rapidly after a change of government, the economic outcome may strengthen precisely that narrative among PiS supporters.
The EU therefore needs to demonstrate that its conditions concern institutional standards rather than partisan alignment.
If the same judicial arrangements would be unacceptable under Tusk, the rule is credible.
If standards become looser because a pro-European government holds office, rule-of-law conditionality begins looking like geopolitical conditionality.
Consistency matters especially for institutions claiming authority above national governments.
Poland’s relationship with the EU illustrates a deeper constitutional tension because the Union is neither a conventional international organisation nor a federal state. Member countries retain democratic sovereignty while accepting supranational rules that constrain national governments.
What happens when a national majority democratically elects a government that changes institutions in ways EU institutions consider incompatible with European legal standards?
Simply saying “national sovereignty” cannot resolve the issue because Poland voluntarily joined a union containing legal commitments.
Simply saying “EU law” cannot resolve it either because European legitimacy ultimately depends on citizens continuing to accept the union’s authority.
European integration therefore requires shared constitutional consent.
Member governments need enough autonomy to reflect national elections while remaining constrained by common rules they accepted by joining.
Poland under PiS tested how far national autonomy extends.
A Tusk government would test whether EU institutions can restore cooperation without appearing to dictate Poland’s domestic politics.
Ukraine adds another complication because PiS has simultaneously been one of Europe’s strongest supporters of Kyiv. Poland accepted millions of Ukrainian refugees, transferred substantial military equipment and became a crucial logistical route for Western assistance.
This demonstrates why governments cannot be placed neatly on one ideological axis.
A party can clash with Brussels over judicial independence while pursuing a foreign policy many European governments consider strategically essential.
PiS’s nationalism has made it sceptical of some EU integration while making it intensely hostile to Russian imperialism.
Political ideologies contain combinations rather than packages.
That complexity matters because opposition to PiS should not become opposition to every policy implemented under PiS. A new government should preserve policies that serve Poland regardless of who introduced them.
Institutional maturity means separating policy continuity from partisan ownership.
The same principle applies to PiS supporters. If the opposition forms government legitimately, accepting the transition does not require agreeing with its programme. It requires recognising that political authority is temporary.
This is the central democratic test after close or polarised elections.
Can the losing side distinguish losing the government from losing the country?
If PiS treats a Tusk government as inherently illegitimate because smaller parties combined to defeat the largest individual party, it would misunderstand parliamentary democracy. Poland’s voters elect the Sejm, and a government needs a parliamentary majority.
The largest party receives the strongest individual mandate.
It does not automatically receive executive power.
Spain demonstrated the same principle in July.
Coalition legitimacy comes from the majority constructed across elected representatives.
That can frustrate voters who think elections should produce one obvious winner, but proportional systems deliberately allow several political constituencies to remain represented rather than manufacturing artificial majorities.
The opposition coalition itself will face substantial internal differences. Civic Coalition, Third Way and the Left agree strongly on removing PiS from government and restoring aspects of institutional independence, but they differ on taxation, social policy, abortion, climate and the appropriate scale of economic intervention.
Negative coalitions again face the problem of governing after the common opponent is defeated.
Institutional repair may provide enough common purpose initially.
Eventually ordinary politics returns.
That would actually be a sign of democratic normalisation.
A democracy should not remain permanently organised around the existential question of whether democracy itself will survive.
Political competition should eventually return to arguments about pensions, taxes, schools, energy and healthcare.
When every election becomes a final battle over the constitutional order, losing becomes too dangerous and compromise becomes irrational.
Democratic stability therefore requires lowering the stakes of politics.
That sounds paradoxical because elections matter precisely because policy matters. The objective is not making elections meaningless. It is ensuring no election determines whether the losing side retains basic political rights or whether institutions remain capable of constraining the winner.
People should care intensely about who governs without believing defeat means permanent exclusion.
Poland may now have an opportunity to move back towards that equilibrium.
The opportunity exists because electoral competition remained strong enough to produce alternation despite eight years of institutional conflict.
That itself is important.
Democratic backsliding is often discussed as though countries move through a one-way sequence: liberal democracy weakens, institutions become captured and eventually authoritarianism becomes irreversible.
Reality can be more contingent.
Institutions can deteriorate and recover.
Courts can lose independence and regain it.
Media systems can become politicised and later reform.
Voters can remove governments accused of weakening constraints.
There may be tipping points beyond which reversal becomes extremely difficult, but Poland suggests those points should not be declared prematurely.
This is institutional hysteresis without inevitability. Political changes can leave lasting effects even after the government responsible disappears, but later governments still possess choices about whether to preserve or reverse them.
The hardest part is that restoration itself needs to follow democratic constraints.
Otherwise the cure reproduces the mechanism of the disease.
If Tusk’s coalition eventually forms a government, its success should therefore not be measured simply by how quickly it removes PiS influence from state institutions.
It should be measured by whether those institutions become harder for any future government, including Tusk’s own, to control.
That is a much higher standard.
It means giving up powers you could use.
It means allowing courts to rule against you.
It means allowing public media to criticise you.
It means designing appointments that may eventually produce officials you dislike.
Democratic politicians frequently support institutional independence most strongly while they are in opposition because independence protects them from government.
The real test comes after they win.
Poland’s opposition may have spent eight years arguing that political power needs stronger constraints.
Polish voters now appear ready to give it political power.
If that happens, the argument becomes a responsibility.
The objective cannot simply be replacing PiS’s people with different people.
It has to be constructing institutions in which it matters less which people control them.
That is the difference between winning an election and repairing a democracy.
