One Battle for Democracy After Another

8:26Noel King:No, he was not. He was Kassandra-ing. The unstated agreement, Poland's democracy is a project that we all share, was in a lot of trouble. And Jaroslaw Kurski was completely right about what happened next.

8:38Miles Bryan:From the minute it took power, the Law and Justice Party attacked the foundations of Poland's liberal democracy. Those foundations in any democracy are institutions. List them, please. Well, a couple of big ones. The courts, civil society, the media. Law and justice attacked all three.

8:54Noel King:All right, so let's start with Poland's courts. When a new law is passed in Poland, top politicians have the option to ask, is this constitutional? And there's a constitutional court that answers.

9:06Miles Bryan:This court has a lot of power. In the U.S., it would be like if the Supreme Court could sign off on new laws.

9:12Noel King:And for many years, Poland had appointed judges to that court in a nonpartisan way.

9:16Miles Bryan:But Lawn Justice blew that up, jammed judges that it liked onto the courts to decide what was constitutional and what wasn't. They imagined that the courts would carry out the policies of the party. For them, it's unimaginable that courts or a Supreme Court would change the decisions of the state, of the head of state, right? Power must belong to the head of state, and that must be Kaczyński.

9:41Noel King:All right, so the courts are captured and then comes civil society. Law and justice shut down NGOs. They raided the offices of women's organizations. They abolished a council that dealt with racism. They cut funding for LGBT organizations. Law and justice basically went after anything that suggested liberal tolerance. And then they redirected government funding to Christian groups.

10:04Miles Bryan:And then the media. Yaroslav Kursky's paper got hit by so many lawsuits that they were worried about going bankrupt from legal fees.

10:11Noel King:Did they go after you?

10:15Miles Bryan:Well, me personally, I was only the object of certain media attacks. But the idea is to create a freezing effect. You flood a certain outlet or media outlet with litigations, and they are just unable to defend themselves. Now, his paper, Gazeta Waborska, it survived. It still exists today. But it turned out something else was more vulnerable.

10:34Noel King:Poland's state media, Poland's state TV. It's funded by the government, but it is mostly editorially independent. Now, unsurprisingly, it always had a slight bias toward whichever party was in power, but it had a big audience. People watched state TV for the news. It was not sexy, but it was trusted.

10:53Miles Bryan:Its tone was sober.

10:54Noel King:Responsible.

10:55Miles Bryan:Centrist. Even boring. But after Law and Justice won in 2015, it went ham on state media. It took over.

11:02Noel King:Yeah, party leaders looked around and they found a young anchor who was working for a tiny conservative TV station, a guy named Michael Rakhon. You're a TV guy.

11:11Miles Bryan:I'm a TV guy with a political background.

11:14Noel King:He is charismatic. He is handsome. He's tall.

11:17Miles Bryan:I play basketball. You want this guy in the paint. He's huge.

11:20Noel King:He is also a devout conservative. You kept calling him Poland's Tucker Carlson, but that is not how he identifies.

11:27Miles Bryan:The biggest impact on me as a TV personality, I'd go for Bill O 'Reilly. Look, whatever. The point is, like O 'Reilly, the guy is great at television. And Law and Justice said, give him a show.

11:39Noel King:Now, you should know that Michal was one of those people who'd never believed the story about the plane crash that killed the president. He'd been working in marketing in 2010 when the crash happened, but he made a switch.

11:50Miles Bryan:I knew personally like President Lech Kaczynski and many other people who were on board of that plane.

11:56Noel King:And you decided that day to go into journalism?

11:58Miles Bryan:Because I saw that to what extent the lies about what happened back then were overwhelming all over the media sphere in Poland. No one was asking a question. What happened?

12:12Noel King:How did you change the coverage when you took over as anchor?

12:15Miles Bryan:I was just asking questions. State media under law and justice was such a fire hose of biased programming, it became a joke. Like, literally, there was a meme about how insane the text running at the bottom of the screen was. Some classics.

12:29Noel King:Leftist fascism is destroying Poland.

12:32Miles Bryan:The opposition's plan? Take money from polls.

12:34Noel King:And this one. Will the liberal candidate who is running for president, quote, fulfill Jewish demands? Ugh.

12:41Miles Bryan:Yeah. Boring, centrist state media had fully foxed out. It brought the conspiracies out of the shadows and into the ears and eyeballs of millions of polls.

12:50Noel King:On the other side of the political aisle, Poland's liberal Democrats were watching this and they were furious. Not just because their rivals were running state TV and, as they saw it, brainwashing people, but because the coverage had consequences.

13:03Miles Bryan:One example, state TV started digging into the liberal mayor of the city of Gdansk and claiming, without much evidence, he was on the take. And they went after Pavel Adamowicz hard. And there's several thousand television segments created about him that are just intended to destroy him. On a freezing cold night in January of 2019, the mayor of Gdansk took the stage at an event for needy kids. As he looked out on the crowd, a man ran across the stage and stabbed him multiple times in the chest with a knife, mortally wounding him.

13:36Noel King:And then it somehow got even weirder. The killer grabbed a microphone and he started yelling about Civic Platform. That's the main liberal Democratic Party. There's nothing specific in the mayor's past that suggests why he was targeted. He has been very open about liberal issues that he supports from LGBT rights, tolerance to minorities. We will defend our Gdansk, our Poland and our Europe against hatred and contempt. We promise you this. Farewell, Paweł. Yeah, this was a cold-blooded murder committed in public, in front of kids. And who could you blame? Well, many, many Poles blamed the state media.

14:15Noel King:After he died, the mayor's wife was like, you guys, this divisive crap is tearing us apart. She has this great quote. She says, one day we'll reach hell. And then what? We all just kill each other?

14:28Miles Bryan:Michal Rahon, the state TV anchor, he vehemently denies that his coverage had anything to do with the murder. But it was a rock bottom moment. The respectful democracy that polls had fought for felt to many like it was vanishing in this toxic haze of partisan conspiracies. They whisper things like, the other side doesn't just disagree with you on policy. They are your enemy.

14:49Noel King:This is both familiar and very, very sad. Jaroslav Kurski was heartbroken about what had happened to the media and to Poland.

14:56Miles Bryan:These guys are left, these guys are right. Those guys scored, this one fell. It's our country. Stakes are too high. We fought for it. We were in prison for it. I can't watch it as a soccer game.

15:09Noel King:It had begun to look like maybe there was no way out of this game. The country was divided politically almost 50-50, and law and justice could win more elections in a 50-50 scenario.

15:21Miles Bryan:And then law and justice took another step, and this time it was too far.

15:26Noel King:That's coming up.

15:30Noel King:Support for Today Explained comes from Delete Me. If you're online, there's a decent chance that your personal information has been collected by bad actors. That's where Delete Me comes in. And Delete Me can make it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Worth noting, the New York Times Wirecutter has named Delete Me their top pick for data removal services compared to others out there. Claire White deleted herself. The past year, having Delete Me as my kind of security guard has been awesome.

16:00Miles Bryan:They remove tons of unwanted listings where my data is available to all kinds of bad actors on the Internet. And I feel really good knowing that they continue to monitor it even after I've set up my account. You get monthly reports.

16:14Noel King:You get to see where your information is leaving, is being scrubbed from, and places where you're clean, which feels really nice. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now at a special discount for our listeners. Get 20 % off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeliteme.com slash today and use the promo code today at checkout. The way to get 20 % off is to go to joinsalibi.com slash today and enter code today at checkout. joinsalibi.com slash today code today.

16:42Miles Bryan:Support for this show comes from found. If you're a small business owner, wrangling your finances can feel like an ongoing struggle. You might be anxious about your taxes or stuck chasing receipts and invoices, all while toggling between multiple disconnected apps. And at the end of the day, that time could be better spent on your customers. But Found says they can help you finally get a hold on your business finances, and all from a convenient place. Found can help you eliminate your finance clutter by giving you one platform that handles it all, including banking, bookkeeping, invoices, and taxes.

17:18Miles Bryan:That means no more paying for multiple subscriptions or dealing with clunky, outdated apps. Plus, Found says they want to help make tax season a little less stressful by automating things like tracking expenses and finding write-offs. You can take back control of your business today. You can open a Found account for free at found.com. That's F-O-U-N-D dot com. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by LeadBank, member FDIC. You can join the hundreds of thousands who have already streamed their finances with Found.

17:59Miles Bryan:Support for this show comes from American Giant. As we inch toward the spring and temperatures begin to rise ever so slowly, it can be tricky to figure out the right amount of layers to put on. But one article of clothing you can always count on, no matter the weather, is the hoodie. That's why American Giant says that their classic full-zip hoodie is made to last a lifetime, ready to bring you warmth and comfort year after year. But it's not just the hoodie. American Giant says that they have a wide range of clothing options that are built to last. Recently, our colleague Andrew Melnizik got to order some American Giant.

18:37Miles Bryan:American Giant just sent me a pair of their roughneck pants. The material is great and it's made up of a cotton canvas. It's one of those types of pants where you can wear while really doing anything. And this season, you can snag the hoodie that will bring you comfort for life. the American Giant Classic Full Zip, and save 20 % off your first order at American-Giant.com when you use the code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's American-Giant.com and use code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's 20 % off your first order at American-Giant.com slash EXPLAINED. Code EXPLAINED.

19:20Miles Bryan:This is Today Explained.

19:45Noel King:Soviet Union. I think Yaroslav Kursky would really like her. Now, around five years ago, this young activist found her reason to get activated. Her country, with its history of young people protesting oppressive regimes, had elected a conservative government, and that conservative government had started to feel oppressive.

20:04Miles Bryan:Because it felt like that government really represented everything that we really didn't want to have in our country. In the first of the show, we told you that law and justice attacked both the media and the courts. Now, the media drew a lot of attention. Everybody could see what was happening. It was literally on TV.

20:21Noel King:Right. But at first, the situation in the courts was much more subtle because who among us is paying attention to what our judges are up to?

20:28Miles Bryan:But then came the issue that can be reliably counted on to galvanize nearly everybody. Abortion.

20:35Noel King:Poland is a very Catholic country, and so the existing abortion law was strict. There were very few exceptions. But law and justice wanted to tighten it even further to make abortion illegal in just about every single case.

20:48Miles Bryan:You know, this proposal was so extreme that law and justice couldn't quite get the support to pass a bill in the parliament and get it signed into law. Thousands of people have taken to the streets of Warsaw to protest against a potential total ban on abortion in Poland. Poland would be the eighth country in the world to practice a no exceptions full ban on abortion. For a large section of the population, Clearly, it's too much.

21:10Noel King:But you'll remember they had the courts. So they did the thing that authoritarians do so well. They slipped this law through on procedural grounds. They used the mechanisms of democracy for undemocratic ends.

21:23Miles Bryan:They had the constitutional court rule the current abortion law unconstitutional. Turns out it was too permissive. Got to be tighter. Very clever. Very clever. Clever, yes, but it made protesters even more mad. Protesters are now four and a half hours into an eight hour sitting. Though the atmosphere is festive, the main slogan is an expression of pure rage. Here's Jarosz Lakorski again. Law and justice was doing lots of things that were undemocratic. Why was this the straw that broke the camel's back? So not everyone has any business in the court. Not everyone reads newspapers, you know, they go on social media.

22:00Miles Bryan:But everyone has a mother and maybe a daughter.

22:03Noel King:Everyone has a mother and maybe a daughter. And get this, some people are also mothers and daughters.

22:09Miles Bryan:No. Dominica Lasota is a daughter. She's 24 now. In 2020, when this abortion change was finagled through the courts, she was a teenager.

22:17Noel King:What was it like being in those protests? Oh, I mean, it was amazing.

22:24Miles Bryan:It was incredible because in my, you know, rather boring city, a city that is not politically involved, like suddenly we saw all of these huge crowds of people just like really erupting out of nowhere in our streets. And I remember we would be walking through these like very, you know, working class residential districts of the city. And people would just like open the windows and like, you know, scream to us like some of them hated us. But then also many of them were like, yes, yes. It's just kind of like uncovered this side of our nation that I didn't know like existed. This was fun. It was fun for her.

23:01Miles Bryan:We would go back later on to our flats and just like, you know, drink beers and talk bad things about the government. So it was it was incredible.

23:13Noel King:And being out in the streets a little buzzed gave her an idea, an idea you can only have in a democracy. And here was the idea. In a democracy, there is always a next election.

23:25Miles Bryan:The abortion protests didn't actually overturn the law, but they did something else important. They proved that large masses of polls could mobilize against law and justice. And if all those people voted, it might be enough to vote law and justice out. And in 2023, at the beginning, like that is exactly what we were trying to figure out. Like, how can we yet again, like unleash that force or like tap into it to finally deal with, you know, the sources and the reason behind all of these injustices that we've been seeing. For Poland's liberals, the 2023 election felt like a last stand. Law and justice had been in power for eight years.

24:02Miles Bryan:They had the courts. They had the media. They were chipping away at everything that Polish liberals felt like they'd built since they went to vote for the first time under posters of Gary Cooper holding a ballot.

24:12Noel King:And in this election, polls were really pissed about a lot of stuff, but definitely about that abortion law. Law and justice had lost a lot of support. In fact, the man who was their literal prime minister at the time, Mateusz Morawiecki admitted as much to us in an interview in Warsaw. I think that the ruling of the Constitutional Tribunal on abortion was not necessary because it was the moment when the popularity of our party dropped by 10 percentage points and we

24:41Miles Bryan:never recovered.

24:42Noel King:The abortion law was that significant?

24:45Miles Bryan:No, that was absolutely significant. The liberals realized they had a shot at taking power back.

24:51Noel King:But first they had to unite.

24:53Miles Bryan:So they did.

24:54Noel King:The center left, the far left, the Farmers Party, not that far left. They said, look, we disagree on some stuff, but we agree on democracy.

25:02Miles Bryan:The deal they struck was we don't undercut each other.

25:05Noel King:They called the former prime minister, Donald Tusk, to lead them. The right hated this guy. Remember, it's like if Obama came back.

25:11Miles Bryan:Law and justice, they tried to fight back. They called the opposition criminals, even communists, which is like the ultimate diss in Poland. They even tried to ban Donald Tusk from running, which was a bad move. It was a really bad move. Nobody likes being told who they can't vote for. It led to huge protests.

25:27Noel King:And it played right into the liberal Democrats' hands because they were out there saying, this is not just an election. Your democracy is at stake. And it was. So in October of 2023, polls went to the polls.

25:41Miles Bryan:We met together like an hour before the results and like already sat down on the couch and just stared at the TV and everybody was silent. We were all just like, we're either going to drink a lot of hard alcohol later for the bad reasons, or we're just going to run to the streets for the good reasons. They ended the night in the streets. Poland won. Democracy has won.

26:08Noel King:We have removed them from power.

26:10Miles Bryan:In a speech this morning to parliament, Tusk promised to restore democratic norms. 74 % voter turnout. More than the first free election in 1989. 68 % of young people.

26:23Noel King:A youth quake, analysts called it.

26:25Miles Bryan:I bursted into tears. Because it also felt like we really pulled something impossible. That's what it felt. We were really in our last legs. Here at the newspaper, but also among our families and friends. Here we must note, when all the votes were counted, law and justice still won the largest share of seats in parliament. The problem was everyone had allied against them. In Poland's parliamentary system, you need coalition partners, allies to form a government. The liberals, they had allies. No one was interested in allying with the conservatives anymore. Law and justice was cooked. And I remember I said this, everything's going to change now.

27:08Miles Bryan:And I have it on the video.

27:17Miles Bryan:I love how hopeful I was. I find that 21-year-old girl cute, but she did not know what's coming. Yeah, I don't watch that video often. We were absolutely clueless.

27:41Noel King:So, you voted the authoritarians out. Great job. Now comes the hard part.

27:46Miles Bryan:That's tomorrow on Today Explained.

27:51Noel King:Miles Bryan produced today's show. Jolie Myers edited. Patrick Boyden, David Tattashore engineered. And Andrea Lopez Cruzado checked the facts. Thanks so much to Gregor Sokol in Warsaw. I'm Noelle King. And I'm Miles Bryan. It's Today Explained.

28:35This is just something that sounds reallyasons in plants. Bye