Eurasia Press & News
Warsaw’s Support for Ukraine Should Not Obscure Its Assault on Democracy at Home
When Joe Biden campaigned for president, he called out the democratic backsliding that had taken place in eastern Europe on his predecessor’s watch. “You see what’s happened in everything from Belarus to Poland to Hungary, and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the world,” he told a town hall audience in October 2020. Biden was lumping Poland together with countries where democracy was on life support, if not already dead. Biden’s comments alluded to the fact that Law and Justice, the right-wing populist party that has governed Poland since 2015, had been steadily eroding judicial independence, press freedom, and civic pluralism. That summer, President Andrzej Duda won reelection promising “LGBT-free zones” and a war on “gender ideology.” Two days after Biden’s remarks, Poland’s high court decreed a near-total ban on abortion.
In 2021, when Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko began busing Afghan and Iraqi refugees to the Polish-Belarusian border, Duda likened the moves to “hybrid warfare.” The Polish government had its guards repel the migrants with water cannons, banned media access to the area, and spent over $407 million to build a 115-mile-long steel wall on its border with Belarus.
And yet in March 2022, when Biden traveled to Poland to rally support for the war in Ukraine, he lauded the country as a leader in the global fight for democracy. “Democracies of the world are revitalized,” Biden said, standing before the Royal Castle in Warsaw, which Biden described as having a “sacred place in the history not only of Europe but humankind’s unending search for freedom.” Biden’s 2022 speech in Warsaw was, to say the least, a startling reversal from his campaign trail rhetoric.
In February of this year, Biden returned once again to the Royal Castle, praising his host country for being one of the United States’ “great allies.” But although Biden talked about democracy and Poland in both of his Warsaw speeches, in 2023, he never put the two words in the same sentence. Poland may have demonstrated solidarity with the Ukrainian fight for sovereignty, but democracy belongs to activists in Belarus, Moldova, and of course Ukraine. In reality, Poland has continued its democratic backsliding while supporting its neighbor’s struggle against Russia. Yet Biden no longer criticizes Poland’s growing illiberalism.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, the United States and its European allies have looked the other way as the Polish government has continued its assault on democracy because of the country’s unique strategic importance. Of all NATO and EU countries, Poland has the most heavily trafficked border with Ukraine. Poland has occupied a central place in NATO’s eastern flank since 1999, when it joined the alliance. But its strategic position took on new importance in 2022 as, overnight, Poland became a bustling transit hub for refugees, aid workers, and military personnel.
But Poland’s strategic position must not insulate it against criticism. With parliamentary elections in October, the Polish government is fomenting culture wars that paint Ukraine as a historic agent of genocide, and it is pushing economic policies that could impede Ukraine’s recovery. Ukrainian refugees whom Poland famously welcomed beginning in February 2022 are beginning to face more and more xenophobia across Polish society—in large part because of the sweeping anti-migrant rhetoric that Law and Justice has made the centerpiece of its reelection campaign.
Over the past 18 months, commentators have gone back and forth debating whether Poland’s newfound strategic importance would lead the right-wing government to embrace liberal democracy. In August of last year, influential Polish commentators Jaroslaw Kuisz and Karolina Wigura noted in Foreign Policy that “hopes are therefore high that Poland not only aligns with the rest of Europe strategically but also finds its way back onto the liberal democratic path.” (In an incisive New York Times op-ed published this June, Kuisz and Wigura made clear that they now see this as impossible.) In an April op-ed for Politico, German Marshall Fund analyst Marta Prochwicz-Jazowska noted that “war makes for strange bedfellows,” but concluded that “there can be no free pass when it comes to democracy.” Yet recent events make clear that Poland is getting exactly that. Continuing to give Poland’s government a free pass will facilitate the international spread of illiberal democracy by teaching other governments that attacks on democratic institutions are tolerated as long as you support the larger goals of U.S. foreign policy. It is time for Biden to tell the truth again about what’s going on inside Poland.
LAW AND JUSTICE IN NAME ONLY
Founded in 2001 by the twin former child actors turned political operatives Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski, Law and Justice began as an anticorruption movement to investigate politicians from Poland’s postcommunist left. Upon the formation of its first government in 2005, however, Law and Justice foreswore cooperation with the center-right liberals led by Donald Tusk, turning to agrarian populists and far-right religious extremists to form a coalition government.
By 2007, the party had moved far to the right, criticizing the European Union and allying itself with a fundamentalist Catholic media empire called Radio Mary, until a corruption scandal brought the government down. But Law and Justice kept the Polish presidency until Lech Kaczynski perished, together with 95 other government officials and social activists, in April 2010 in a plane crash outside Smolensk, Russia—which his twin brother was quick to blame on both Putin and Tusk, who was then serving as prime minister. From that crash was born the so-called Smolensk cult, an accusation of conspiracy between the Kremlin and most of the Polish political spectrum.
When Law and Justice returned to power in 2015 by scoring both a parliamentary majority and the presidency under Duda, the accusation that political opponents represented foreign interests remained, and helped to dictate a political agenda combining illiberal nationalism with a substantial expansion of the Polish welfare state. The government garnered press for suppressing strikes by schoolteachers, nurses, and ecological activists protesting deforestation in Poland’s east. It has increased cash welfare payouts to families and farmers, while at the same time, co-opting the public media, eliminating judicial independence, and promoting the interests of the Catholic Church. The government’s transformation of state-owned radio and television into Law and Justice propaganda outlets was completed in 2016.
Biden no longer criticizes Poland’s growing illiberalism.
Dismantling the independent judiciary has taken longer and has been subject to challenges before the European Court of Human Rights and threats of sanctions from the European Commission. The judicial takeover involved lowering retirement ages, auditing and smearing independent jurists, and dismantling the apolitical, collegial system that previously set rules and enforced standards within the judiciary. Poland’s justice minister now doubles as a greatly empowered attorney general whose politically appointed state attorneys have the power to initiate disciplinary proceedings against judges of their choice. It was Law and Justice’s co-optation of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal that resulted in the court’s announcement in October 2020 of a near-total ban on abortion in Poland, which was followed by months of street protests. In the end, the protests waned, and the ban became law.
The most recent chapter in Law and Justice’s democratic backsliding is squarely tied to the parliamentary elections in October, in which Tusk’s coalition has a real chance of taking power. Making no secret of its intention to prosecute Tusk himself, Law and Justice has created a new standing Commission to Investigate Russian Influence, signed into law by Duda on May 29. Commission members are appointed by the Law and Justice–controlled parliament and have the right to investigate any suspected “Russian influence” in Poland during the years 2007 to 2022 (including eight years when Tusk was prime minister). The commission can unilaterally cancel contracts in defense, technology, and other sectors of the economy if it decides that Russian interests are at play. On June 4, Poland saw its biggest civic unrest since the 2020 protests against the abortion ban: 500,000 people took to the streets to celebrate the anniversary of Poland’s exit from communism and to protest the new commission.
THE BACKLASH
On the international stage, this backsliding has garnered less and less attention as Poland’s welcoming of Ukrainian refugees has received widespread praise—which of course it should. Since February 2022, over 13.7 million Ukrainians have transited through Poland, with over one million remaining in the country. The outpouring of Polish solidarity with Ukrainians was genuine, unprecedented, and extraordinary. But it will not last, as Poles blame both cyclical and structural problems in their social services on the Ukrainians who have sought refuge in their country. Already in November of last year, Polish headlines announced the troubling results of major studies of public opinion: “Poles are for Ukraine, but against Ukrainians,” as sociologists Przemyslaw Sadura and Slawomir Sierakowski put it. They sum up their interviews as follows: “In every social group, age group, in big as in small towns, without differentiation by gender, negative feelings predominate toward refugees from Ukraine. And so we are sitting on a ticking time bomb.” A January 2023 survey by Warsaw Enterprise Institute/Maison & Partners notes that 62 percent of respondents agreed that “Poland cannot afford” Ukrainian refugees and 41 percent said that “refugees from Ukraine are in truth economic migrants.”
Since the fall of 2022, swing voters who helped return Duda to the presidency in 2020 have increasingly worried that financial assistance for refugees will compete with the cash payouts that the government provides to Polish families. Concerns are growing that Ukrainian refugees are taking away jobs, preventing Polish children from attending sought-after schools, and forcing Polish patients to wait longer for surgeries. Law and Justice is looking to trade on these anxieties to win the support of swing voters this fall, hoping to exploit Poles’ “cratering levels of confidence” (Sadura and Sierakowski’s words) in each other. The government’s occasional far-right partners who form a political bloc known as the Confederation have been actively stoking these anxieties almost from the start of the war in Ukraine, and Confederation politicians have campaigned aggressively to limit refugee numbers and cut their social benefits and access to jobs.
Since late 2022, Amnesty International has reported more and more anti-Ukrainian hate speech on Polish social media. Public officials also broadcast these messages. The state superintendent for schools in the Malopolska region, a prominent Krakow-based activist for Law and Justice, tweeted, “The wave of Ukrainians fleeing the war has given our country’s anti-Polish circles hope that they can finally succeed in watering down Polish identity. They demand an end to teaching Polish history and literature, under the pretext of coddling the feelings of Ukrainians. We refuse to surrender our Polishness!”
Poland’s strategic position must not insulate it against criticism.
The Polish government is also using history to stir up these sentiments. On July 11, the same day that NATO leaders met in Vilnius to discuss Ukraine’s possible future in the alliance, Poland commemorated the 80th anniversary of a campaign of slaughter carried out by Ukrainian nationalist militias in Nazi-occupied Volhynia, a region that before World War II belonged to Poland but is now part of western Ukraine. Estimates of the number of Poles massacred throughout 1943 range from 60,000 to 100,000. Volhynia has long been a festering sore in Polish-Ukrainian relations. In 2016, the Polish parliament passed legislation designating the Volhynia killings a Ukrainian “genocide” against Poles, a decision the Ukrainian parliament formally condemned. Several months later, Ukraine banned distribution of the major blockbuster Polish-language motion picture Volhynia (distributed in English under the title Hatred), which dramatized the killings. Last summer, months after Russia’s invasion, Poland’s Education Ministry mandated new history textbooks—which include the contested “genocide” language—for Polish secondary schools nationwide. This textbook came into use just as 185,000 Ukrainian refugee children were heading into the Polish school system.
The Polish government has been playing both sides, affirming Ukrainian sovereignty while calling on Ukraine to make amends. In May, Lukasz Jasina, the Polish Foreign Ministry’s press spokesman, said in an interview that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should issue a formal apology for Ukrainians who killed Poles during World War II. As journalist Pawel Wronski recently noted, there is a correlation between Law and Justice’s weaponization of memory and Kremlin disinformation: Russia, too, demands Ukrainian apologies for Volhynia, because pro-Kremlin historians claim the Polish victims as Soviet citizens. “Could this mean that, by issuing an apology for Volhynia and for Ukrainian nationalist genocide, the President of Ukraine would, in a time of war, be saying: yes, the Russians were right?” Wronski wrote.
At a joint commemoration ceremony for Volhynia in July, Duda and Zelensky issued a statement that contained no mention of either who the victims or perpetrators were, noting only, “We are stronger together.” But Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Law and Justice party chair and since last month also Poland’s deputy prime minister, has bluntly declared that the Ukrainian “genocide was exceptionally brutal, gruesome, even worse than the German genocides.”
The Polish government’s growing indulgence of anti-Ukrainian sentiment goes beyond culture wars to policymaking. When Zelensky visited Warsaw in March—the first time since Russia’s invasion began—Polish farmers took to the streets of the country’s major cities to protest preferential pricing in Europe for Ukrainian grain. Poland rallied Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia to successfully pressure the European Commission to eliminate Ukrainian grain from those countries’ markets. In turn, Zelensky protested Poland’s actions as “a gross violation of the Association Agreement and the founding treaties of the EU.” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki made clear that, in Poland, “We care first and foremost about the Polish farmer.” The import restrictions are set to expire in September, and Kyiv and Warsaw seemed to have buried the hatchet—until Poland began demanding this month that Brussels extend the ban. If the EU fails to do this, the five countries have pledged to ban Ukrainian grain on their own. Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal responded, tweeting, “This is an unfriendly and populist move that will severely impact global food security and Ukraine’s economy.”
MEMORY HOLE
The burgeoning attacks on Ukrainians fit a pattern. For a decade, Poland’s government has honed its ability to abuse history to find scapegoats and suppress criticism, a technique it has used to quash academic freedom and shore up support from the Catholic hierarchy. The gist of Law and Justice’s approach is to water down Polish history to a morality tale of untainted heroism and martyrdom. Critics of this tale face persecution and branding as “traitors to the nation.” Painting Ukrainians as agents of genocide who need to confess and beg forgiveness from the righteous Polish nation is part of a larger memory-making agenda that Law and Justice believes is needed to keep Poland strong in the international arena.
The party has long targeted former president and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Lech Walesa, whom Law and Justice has denounced as a onetime communist agent. Law and Justice has also tried to scrub Polish anti-Semitism from the history of the Holocaust. In 2018, it adopted an amendment threatening to criminalize scholarship that might “assign responsibility or co-responsibility to the Polish Nation.” In response to pressure from Israel and the United States, the government partially backtracked, dropping the criminal provisions. Yet in April, Morawiecki denounced Poland’s most prominent historian of the Holocaust, Barbara Engelking, after she said in a televised interview that “Jews were unbelievably disappointed with Poles during the war.” Following the prime minister’s comments, Poland’s Education Ministry announced salary cuts for all researchers at the public-funded Polish Academy of Sciences institute where Engelking is employed; these cuts were withdrawn a month later, but only following an organized international protest campaign led by institutions such as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
The United States should be prepared for further frontal assaults by Poland’s government, not just on Polish historians but on American media interests, too. A key barometer is the station TVN, which is majority U.S.-owned, and the only major TV outlet in Poland that remains critical of the government. In 2021, the Law and Justice–controlled parliament passed a law that would have forced Warner Bros. Discovery to sell TVN. Duda’s veto ultimately saved the network, following months of shuttle diplomacy by the United States. But TVN is once again under threat. In March, it aired a documentary film containing revelations that, before his election to the papacy, Pope John Paul II knew about and covered up cases of child molestation by clergy in his archdiocese in Poland. Rather than take the revelations seriously, Polish government ministers began denouncing a “foreign-backed” conspiracy trying to smear Poland’s greatest native son. Within days of the documentary airing on TVN, U.S. ambassador to Poland Mark Brzezinski was summoned to the Foreign Ministry to discuss the national security implications of TVN’s programming. (It was TVN that aired the Engelking interview, as well.)
TOUGH LOVE
The United States needs to take a firmer stand on Poland. The example of Viktor Orban’s Hungary shows that dismantling the independent judiciary and muzzling free speech aren’t merely election-year strategies; they are the building blocks of a durable illiberal democracy. The U.S. State Department needs to call out Polish government attacks on media and on rule of law.
The State Department’s May 30 press release expressing U.S. “concern” over the new Commission to Investigate Russian Influence is an important step in this direction. But Brzezinski should return to his predecessor’s policy of publicly denouncing Polish campaigns against U.S. economic interests—and publicly rebuke the Polish government for targeting TVN. The Polish Education Ministry’s about-face on punitive measures against Holocaust scholars shows that international pressure works, especially when U.S. institutions get involved.
One could argue that Poland is just one of many places—including India, Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—where Biden’s human rights promises are taking a backseat to strategic interests. And indeed, Israeli protesters against Benjamin Netanyahu’s government regularly cite Poland as an example that they do not wish their country to follow. But if Biden cannot speak for human rights in a frontline NATO country, where can he?
Poland needs the United States far more than the United States needs it. U.S. direct investment in Poland was estimated at over $25 billion by the Warsaw-based American Chamber of Commerce. Can American investors trust a country whose parliament nearly succeeded in forcing the sale of U.S.-owned media shares? Or whose newly created Commission to Investigate Russian Influence can unilaterally void any contract deemed to be “Russia-friendly,” a pretext to go after political opponents? The State Department, whose latest report on Poland lauds the investment climate, can instead start encouraging investors to call Warsaw’s bluff. The United States can also follow up on its calls for fair elections this fall by encouraging Warsaw to allow election monitors.
At the same time, given its own raging culture wars, the United States needs to be firm and outspoken but avoid hypocrisy. As Daniel Fried, who served as U.S. ambassador to Poland from 1997 to 2001, wrote last month, “In both Poland and the United States, authoritarian temptation—a crouching demon—exists. Elections, approaching in both countries, can bring out anti-democratic temptations.” The United States should use its economic leverage, call out xenophobia and hate speech, and shine a spotlight on any irregularities as Poland’s parliamentary election campaign gets into full swing. There should be a consistent call for the safeguarding of Polish democracy—rather than simply praise for a Polish solidarity that may not be there tomorrow.
