Poland in the 21st century

Aleksander Kwaśniewski was reelected in 2000, while Wałęsa, capturing only 1 percent of the vote as the fourth most popular candidate, announced his retirement from politics. In the 2001 parliamentary elections, a coalition of candidates from the SLD and the Union of Labour (Unia Pracy; UP) were the majority winners, with Leszek Miller of the SLD becoming prime minister. In the next set of elections, the SLD fell to the center-right party Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość; PiS), with its founders, identical twins Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński, attaining the posts of president (2005) and prime minister (2006), respectively. In 2007 the PiS abandoned its coalition partners—the scandal-plagued Self-Defense Party and the League of Polish Families—and called for an early parliamentary election. In a stunning result, the PiS was defeated by the center-right Civic Platform party, which under the premiership of Donald Tusk formed a coalition government with the PSL.

Whether the relatively frequent changes of government would lead ultimately to the emergence of a real and responsible left, center, and right and whether the new constitution would provide a mechanism for a smoothly functioning democracy depended in no small degree on the growing sophistication and experience of the electorate. In a nationwide referendum in 2003, the Polish electorate approved EU membership for their country, which came into force in 2004, a testimony to its successful postcommunist transition.

Although a plan to deploy a major new missile defense system in Poland was scrapped by the United States in 2009, Poland’s willingness to accept the system was a thorn in the side of Russia, as was Pres. Lech Kaczyński’s aggressive support for extending NATO membership to Georgia and Ukraine. On the other hand, decades of strained relations between Poland and Russia over the Katyn Massacre, in which thousands of Polish officers were killed by Soviet troops during World War II, turned a corner on April 7, 2010, when Prime Minister Vladimir Putin became the first Russian leader to participate in commemoration ceremonies at the massacre site. Three days later, on April 10, en route to another memorial ceremony, a plane carrying Kaczyński crashed near Smolensk, near the Katyn site, killing the president, his wife, the army chief of staff, the head of the national security bureau, the president of the national bank, and a number of Polish government officials and evoking widespread mourning in Poland.

In June in the special election to replace Lech Kaczyński, interim president Bronisław Komorowski of the Civic Platform party edged out Jarosław Kaczyński at the head of a 10-candidate field, though neither polled the 50 percent necessary to prevent a runoff election between them. In that contest, held in July, Komorowski won the presidency with 53 percent of the vote.

Poland weathered the global economic downturn that began in 2008 better than most of its EU partners, and the Polish electorate returned the Civic Platform party to power in the 2011 parliamentary elections, making Tusk the first prime minister since the end of communism to serve a second consecutive term. Civic Platform captured about two-fifths of the seats in the Sejm and was poised to continue coalition rule with its junior partner, the PSL.

Much of the political debate in Poland in 2012 centered on Tusk’s plan to reform the pension system, which—after much wrangling between Civic Platform and its junior coalition partner, the Peasant Party—was enacted by the Sejm, raising the retirement age to 67. Numerous scandals contributed to an overall decline in popular support for the Civic Platform and the coalition government. In March 2013 the government survived Kaczyński’s attempt to bring it down with the aid of an iPad message. During debate on what became a failed no-confidence vote, the PiS leader employed the device to play a prerecorded speech by potential prime minister Piotr Glinski, who could not address the Sejm in person because he was not a member. In August Tusk faced a challenge for the party leadership head-on by calling early elections, in which he defeated former minister of justice Jarosław Gowin. A year later the leaders of the European Union voted unanimously to select Tusk to succeed Herman Van Rompuy as the president of European Council. With his term at the head of the European Council set to begin in December, Tusk resigned as prime minister in September and was replaced by Ewa Kopacz, the speaker of the lower house of the Sejm.

Komorowski ran for reelection on May 10, 2015, and finished a close second (with nearly 34 percent of the vote) to the PiS candidate, Andrzej Duda (almost 35 percent). Because neither of the front-runners managed to capture the 50 percent plus necessary for a first-round win—largely as a result of the surprising show of independent candidate Paweł Kukiz, a rock star and actor who garnered some 21 percent of the vote—a runoff election between Komorowski and Duda was required. In the second round of voting, on May 24, Duda outpolled Komorowski (51.55 percent to 48.45 percent) to win the presidency.

Duda’s successful campaign was deftly managed by the theretofore mostly unknown Beata Szydło, who was rewarded for her efforts by being named the PiS candidate for prime minister in the October national parliamentary elections. Seemingly capitalizing on the frustration of many Poles who felt that they had not shared in their country’s economic prosperity during eight years of rule by the Civic Platform, the PiS roared to a dominant victory, capturing nearly 38 percent of the vote, while Civic Platform finished second with about 24 percent. Szydło was positioned to become prime minister, but Kaczyński remained the driving force of the party, which took a Euroskeptic stance but embraced NATO and advocated social conservatism while forwarding a largely left-leaning economic policy.

The PiS government banged heads with the EU midway through 2016 after the government refused to accept a constitutional court ruling that had rejected the government’s proposal to limit the powers of that court. EU officials accused the PiS government of having disregarded the rule of law. Likewise, the government came in for criticism from domestic and foreign observers for having expanded its control of the media and for allegedly silencing voices of opposition. Arguably the most controversial aspect of the PiS effort to impose conservative, Roman Catholic, family-oriented values on Polish society was the introduction of legislation aimed at severely restricting the country’s already rigid abortion laws. In early October the Sejm overwhelmingly (352–58) voted down legislation that would have limited legal abortion to cases in which the mother’s life was threatened. Tens of thousands of Poles—mostly women dressed in black—had taken to the streets across the country earlier in the month to protest the legislation.

In July 2017 Poles once again took to the streets en masse around the country for a number of days when the PiS pushed through three bills aimed at judicial reform that was characterized by the opposition as a threat to democracy, judicial independence, and the rule of law in Poland. Responding to the public outcry as well as to the threat of sanctions from the European Union, President Duda defied Kaczyński and vetoed two of the bills: the bill that would have forced all the sitting judges on the Supreme Court to step down and would have given the minister of justice the power to replace them; and the bill that would have dissolved the National Council of the Judiciary, the body that nominates judges, and would have given parliament the power to determine the makeup of its successor. Duda announced that he would not veto the third bill, which gave the minister of justice the power to appoint the heads of local courts.

In early December 2017, the Sejm passed revised versions of the first two bills that had been framed by Duda. The new legislation reduced the retirement age for high court judges to 65, resulting in immediate forced retirement for some 40 percent of the Supreme Court. Also in December, Kaczyński engineered a dramatic reshuffle of the cabinet in which Mateusz Morawiecki, the deputy prime minister and finance minister, replaced Szydło as prime minister.

Under Morawiecki, the PiS government continued to focus on cultural and identity politics, contrasting Kaczyński’s vision of a Polish society grounded in traditional family-oriented Roman Catholic values with what it characterized as the opposition’s pursuit of a secular, overly migrant-friendly, gender-bending agenda. PiS-driven legislation further restricted the freedom of the press and consolidated the party’s control of the judiciary, pushing the country in an increasingly autocratic direction that resembled the “illiberal democracy” of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Yet, as the Polish economy thrived, the PiS also cast ever wider the social welfare net that arguably narrowed the prosperity gap between those who had initially benefited from the country’s transition away from communism and the party’s rural and small-town base.

For the 2019 legislative election, the three principal opposition parties (Civic Platform, PSL, and Left Alliance) informally joined forces in an attempt to forestall what they saw as the erosion of democracy in the country. Their efforts failed to prevent the PiS from regaining its solid majority in the Sejm, where it repeated its showing in the 2015 election, once again capturing 235 of 460 seats; however, the story was different in the Senate. By restricting the field to one opposition candidate per senatorial district, thus preventing the division of opposition support, the coalition was able to gain control of the Senate by securing 51 of its 100 seats (including three seats won by coalition-endorsed independent candidates). By disrupting the PiS’s monopoly of national power, the opposition was able to at least add some speed bumps to the government’s march to transform Poland.

The 2020 presidential election, scheduled for May, was postponed in response to the health risks posed by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic. The delay gave Civic Platform a chance to replace its underperforming presidential candidate, Małgorzata Kidawa-Błońska, who had led the party’s slate into the 2019 legislative elections, with Warsaw’s popular liberal mayor, Rafał Trzaskowski. Duda sought to capitalize on a cordial meeting with U.S. Pres. Donald Trump in February and, among other issues, took a strong stance against LGBTQ rights and same-sex marriage; Trzaskowski, a vocal advocate of LGBTQ rights, accused Duda of fomenting hate. The two candidates finished at the top of the field in the first round of voting in late June, Duda taking nearly 44 percent of the vote and Trzaskowski about 30 percent. Because neither garnered more than 50 percent, they met again in a runoff election in July, which was narrowly won by Duda, who took just over 51 percent compared with nearly 49 for Trzaskowski.

In October 2020 Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled that a law allowing the termination of pregnancies in cases of severe fetal abnormalities was unconstitutional—a decision that imposed a near total ban on abortions in the country, because the majority of the small number of abortions performed in Poland occurred under those circumstances. Once again hundreds of thousands of Poles took to the streets as part of a “women’s strike” to protest the ruling, which was widely decried across the EU. As the end of the year approached, other EU member states, seeking to restrain what they saw as Poland’s and Hungary’s backsliding on democratic practices, introduced legislation that would tie the dispersal of EU funds to member states’ adherence to the rule of law—particularly, in the case of Poland and Hungary, regarding judicial independence, press freedom, government checks and balances, and a strong anti-corruption framework. Morawiecki joined Orbán in threatening to veto the EU’s proposed €1.8 trillion budget and coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 recovery package if the so-called conditionality mechanism were not eliminated. A compromise was reached in December, when it was agreed that the mechanism would not be employed until the Court of Justice of the European Union had ruled on its legality. That provided political breathing room for Morawiecki and especially Orbán (facing elections in 2022), who withdrew their veto threats, permitting passage of the budget and rescue plan.

Those rescue funds were needed to help shore up Poland’s economy. It had weathered the lockdowns and restrictions necessitated by the pandemic better than many of its European neighbors, but, for the first time in some three decades, the country’s GDP declined, shrinking by 2.8 percent in 2020. With more than 75,000 deaths linked to COVID-19 (the disease caused by the coronavirus) reported by mid-July 2021, Poland had one of the world’s highest per capita pandemic-related death rates.

The political landscape shifted in June 2021, when the PiS lost its majority in the Sejm after three lawmakers pulled out of the governing coalition in response to its decision to begin phasing out coal production. Despite their defection, Morawiecki appeared to have enough conditional support from aligned parties and the opposition to maintain power for the foreseeable future. Since late September 2020 he had been more visibly aided by Kaczyński, the power behind the throne, who, as part of a cabinet reshuffle, had formally entered the government as a deputy prime minister with responsibility for the ministries of defense, justice, and the interior. In July 2021 they found themselves facing off again with their longtime nemesis former prime minister Tusk, who had returned to Polish politics to head up Civic Platform again after his stint as president of the European Council (2014–19).

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Poland became one of Ukraine’s most important supporters in the escalating Russia-Ukraine War, playing a crucial role in the transit of weapons and other forms of aid. Moreover, by October 2023 Poland had taken in more than one million Ukrainian refugees and provided Ukraine with more than $3 billion in arms. However, in September 2023 Morawiecki brought the continuance of Polish military aid into question after the EU removed a ban that it had imposed on the sale of Ukrainian grain in Poland and several other central European countries in an attempt to protect domestic grain producers in those countries when tariff restrictions were dropped to allow Ukraine to transport grain to the European market in the wake of Russia’s disruption of Ukrainian exports.

As the October 2023 Polish parliamentary elections approached, Tusk and the Civic Platform-led opposition presented them as a battle to preserve the country’s democracy. The PiS, seeking a third consecutive term in government, claimed that Civic Platform would put EU masters in charge of Poland’s fate and allow an onslaught of immigrants (even as the government was embroiled in a scandal related to the sale of work visas to African and Asian migrants). Once again, the election shaped up as a contest involving an electorate that was sharply divided between rural supporters of the PiS and urban backers of Civic Platform.

Energized Poles cast their ballots in record numbers: some 74 percent of eligible voters turned out, a level of participation even greater than that of the 1989 election that jettisoned communist rule. The result was a dramatic reversal of fortune for the PiS, which tallied some 35 percent of the vote to finish first but came up short of its performance in past elections: it secured 194 seats in the Sejm, not enough to constitute a ruling majority even with the addition of the 18 seats won by its potential coalition partner, the Confederation party. On the other hand, Civic Platform and its allies, Third Way and the New Left, together stood to claim about 250 seats (taking about 31 percent, 14 percent, and 9 percent of the vote, respectively), enough to make up a parliamentary majority. It remained for Duda to decide who would be given the first chance to form a ruling coalition.