What America’s Democrats should learn from Poland’s shocking presidential election

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How do you restore your country to normalcy after you’ve won it back from a Trumpian party that controlled all branches of government and used them to demolish institutions, pack courts and attack fundamental rights?

And how do you even begin when that party is still embedded in parts of your country’s political system?

Democrats in the United States, who won’t have a chance to retake any branches of government until 2026, are just beginning to wrestle with those questions. For advice, they should turn to the Poles, who are facing these challenges with renewed urgency after Sunday’s presidential election ensured that at least one part of their country will continue to be controlled by an outspoken admirer of U.S. President Donald Trump.

President-elect Karol Nawrocki, a former soccer hooligan and historian who won Sunday’s presidential election, is from Poland’s far-right, ultranationalist Law and Justice Party (PiS). He defeated Warsaw mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, a political scientist and member of the European Parliament.

Mr. Nawrocki’s party controlled parliament, the presidency and the courts for eight years starting in 2015, during which Poland’s ranking on international measures of democracy and rule of law plummeted dramatically. The party had seized political control of previously neutral state institutions, and packed the courts and public media with ultrapartisan activists in a textbook example of the process known as “democratic backsliding.”

Democracy activists around the world celebrated the October, 2023, parliamentary majority victory by a coalition of liberal-democratic parties under the leadership of Prime Minister Donald Tusk as a rare instance of moderate “normal” parties winning power back from an entrenched authoritarian-minded regime.

But Mr. Tusk’s coalition had not won the presidency, which continued to be held by PiS politician Andrzej Duda, and deferred much of its reform agenda in hopes that it would succeed in retaking that office this week.

“Everything was held back – there was some idea that Poland after 2025 would come back to liberal democratic normalcy,” Karolina Wigura, a Polish sociologist and political analyst, said in an interview on Monday. “But what we had before, it turns out, really was the new Polish normalcy – that is, Poland is divided between two camps, two visions of the future of the country, and we’ll have to deal with it.”

The Polish presidency is a largely ceremonial and symbolic office, but the president does have the power to veto any legislation that does not receive a two-thirds parliamentary majority. And it is now actively supported by the U.S. executive: Mr. Nawrocki received enthusiastic support from Mr. Trump and endorsements from members of his cabinet, and from a circle of European far-right leaders. He has vowed to be more aggressive in resisting the government’s liberal reforms.

So one lesson for U.S. Democrats, and others struggling to return their country to normal, is not to wait until the conditions are perfectly right to act, because they never will be. Mr. Tusk did manage to remove some of the extreme activists from positions in the judiciary, the public service and public media and restore them to neutral professionals, as they had been before 2015, but PiS politicians still characterized those as being “globalist” partisan appointments.

Fearing such responses, critics say Mr. Tusk avoided pushing forward reform legislation – including restoration of abortion rights and sexual equality laws – that he knew would be cancelled or denounced by the PiS presidency. In the view of democrats who favoured a more active approach, this was a missed opportunity to show the public that popular attempts at reform were being trampled by figures from the previous regime.

“I think it was rather bizarre that this government didn’t want to show that they have a lot of ideas about how to reform the rule of law, and only the president stood in the way,” said Dr. Wigura.

“Then you have the presidential campaign, in which the liberal side, just like in the U.S., concentrated on the negative side of Mr. Nawrocki, and in the end, as a voter, you wouldn’t have any idea of just what is this liberal vision for Poland – you would only have a good idea about scandals concerning Mr. Nawrocki.”

Those are the Polish lessons for a future American attempt at recovery: Have a positive vision for the future. Boldly do what’s right, even if it’s sure to be defeated. Let the attacks happen, because they show the other side’s colours. Don’t wait until conditions are ideal. And learn from the world’s other democratic movements – both their successes, as Poland showed us in 2023, and their failures, like Sunday’s painful setback.