The authoritarian hangover

6:41Miles Bryan:You know why? Why? Polish people really hate censorship.

6:45Grzegorz Sokol:Anyway, it's hard to overstate how big a deal this was when the liberals pulled the plug.

6:50Noel King:Cutting the cord on state media saying you are done. It is such an aggressive move. It's like, yeah, the liberal Democrats and Donald Tusk finally grew a pair. However.

6:59Grzegorz Sokol:However.

7:00Noel King:Values.

7:00Grzegorz Sokol:Dominika Lasota had values. She'd marched and voted for the liberal Democrats. She'd helped organize the campaign to get them elected. But right in that moment, she found herself sympathizing with the authoritarians.

7:12Miles Bryan:It was insane. Like the stuff they did was it was insane.

7:16Grzegorz Sokol:Dominika is 24. She's an activist. She wanted the liberals to come in and rebuild after the damage law and justice had done to Poland. It seemed like if anyone should have been happy about pulling the plug on Rahon and Foxified state TV, it would be her. Not so.

7:31Miles Bryan:I was at my parents' place. We like we put up the TV to watch it. And I thought that I'm just living through some like Orwellian episodes. it was bizarre it was done in a way that was had nothing to do with any kind of democracy and any kind of like civility which that was their whole platform like we're gonna respect democracy we're gonna respect the rule of law what they did was like they overtook the public media not in a legal way that was not legal to this day it's not legal the way the tv operates

8:05Noel King:right now, it's actually illegal. I have to say, I really respect this take from Dominica.

8:11Grzegorz Sokol:Yeah, liberal democratic values, they have to mean something. They can't just be what you pay lip service to until you regain power.

8:17Noel King:And this was certainly not a liberal move. So why would liberal Democrats resort to pulling the plug?

8:24Grzegorz Sokol:Well, to be fair, they had very few options. And this, as it turns out, is a problem for just about every liberal government that's elected after an authoritarian government has been in power.

8:34Noel King:Right. There are people who study this dynamic. In the case of Poland, that person is political scientist Ben Stanley. He's a Brit by birth. He's Polish by choice.

8:42Miles Bryan:Came out to Poland in 2001, instantly fell in love with the place and just stayed a lot longer than I was expecting to. And that was really when I started to get interested in Polish politics in particular. All right.

8:54Noel King:So the Liberals had been elected to restore democracy. And Ben has a framework for how that generally ends up working. A liberal government can unwind what autocrats did quickly, effectively, so undo everything that they changed, and finally, legally.

9:09Grzegorz Sokol:Quickly, effectively, legally. Sounds great, right? Except Ben's research suggested that it's basically impossible to do all of those at once.

9:17Noel King:So you can do things legally and quickly.

9:21Miles Bryan:But it doesn't really effectively deal with the problem because there's only a limited impact of the things that it can do legally and quickly.

9:27Noel King:Legally and effectively.

9:29Miles Bryan:But this is a long and drawn out process because it involves things like overcoming presidential vetoes.

9:37Noel King:Or quickly and effectively.

9:39Miles Bryan:But at the price of either bending or breaking the law.

9:42Noel King:You get the point. Two out of three in this case is really bad.

9:45Miles Bryan:So the big question for this government has been, to what extent is the imperative of restoring liberal democracy something that justifies either bending liberal democratic norms and laws or breaking them outright? One of the problems that has been exposed in Poland is that certain norms have been overturned. Things that the expectation was on the part of the political mainstream that people simply wouldn't do and simply wouldn't say have been done and said. I think that what can be learned from the Polish case is that once those things have been done and said, it's very difficult to restore the norms that existed before that illiberal government came into power.

10:36Grzegorz Sokol:The liberal Democrats had moved very quickly and very effectively on state media. But just pulling the plug like that, like, is that legal?

10:45Noel King:At the very least, it was pushing the limits. And that explains Dominika's outraged response. Now, this was not just her response. A lot of people were angry about this and they were about to get angrier and their rage would lead to something that no one expected.

11:01Grzegorz Sokol:Coming up, what happens to Poland's politics when everyone got mad?

11:04Miles Bryan:Young people are sick of this system, of the political scene that's been literally shaped by the same bunch of boomers for the past 30 years. Honestly, I'm not surprised at all that a lot of people go to the far right. Because the far right gives them a simple message. Yeah, screw this. Let's just, you know, shake up the whole establishment.

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15:36Grzegorz Sokol:Słuchacie dziś z wyjaśnieniami. You're listening to Today Explained.

15:45Grzegorz Sokol:If the young activist Dominika Lasota represents the voice of Poland's frustrations, well, Rafał Trzcowski is the target.

15:52Miles Bryan:Great. No introductions, just straight to the business.

15:56Grzegorz Sokol:The people tasked with undoing what law and justice did are, of course, the Liberal Democrats.

16:02Noel King:Rafał is a leading Liberal Democrat. In many ways, he is peak Liberal Democrat. His dad's a jazz musician. He went to Oxford. He dresses the way Miles wishes he could dress. And he can communicate in five languages.

16:15Grzegorz Sokol:One of them is French. And he'll be the first person to remind you that despite the complaints about undemocratic behavior, the liberal Democrats didn't just go around pulling the plug on everything their predecessors had done. Half of the people I meet tell me, you're to the right and so on, la la la.

16:32Miles Bryan:Half of the people are saying, you're too soft. You're too nice. You're smiling too much. You should be banging them, you know, and you should be like them because it's important. you should grab a baseball bat and, you know, because otherwise you're not going to win with them.

16:47Grzegorz Sokol:No, in some cases, they moved much more slowly.

16:50Noel King:Possibly too slowly. OK, so remember that the single biggest reason Polish liberals beat law and justice in 2023 was that voters were furious about this very strict abortion law.

17:00Grzegorz Sokol:One of the liberals' most important campaign promises was that they would loosen the abortion law. They promised to do it within 100 days of taking office. It's been 800-ish days since then, and Polish abortion laws haven't changed. Why?

17:15Noel King:I want to ask you whether the government didn't move fast enough on this thing that obviously mattered to a lot of Poles.

17:23Miles Bryan:Well, it matters to me, and it matters to all the members of my party. And we wanted to reverse this medieval law. But we have a coalition government, and unfortunately, one of our partners was against this.

17:35Grzegorz Sokol:Ah, yes, the forever problem with alliances. You don't all want the same thing at the same time. The liberals had teamed up with all sorts of parties in order to win the election against law and justice. Far left, sure, farmers, why not? Came back to bite them.

17:48Miles Bryan:Unfortunately, that's what happened. And yes, I understand that people are angry. And sometimes I share that anger. But I mean, unfortunately, we didn't have the majority to push it on. And also we had a president who said that he would veto that.

18:03Noel King:Poland has a parliamentary system. The president, who was elected in off years, was still a holdover from law and justice. Now, president is not a job that has a ton of power in Poland, but the president does have veto power on laws. So he could veto any changes the liberals tried to make to the abortion law. So the liberal Democrats were going to need to get one of their guys elected president in order to get this done. Rofl, who we should say is the very popular mayor of Warsaw, was like, all right, I'll do it.

18:31Grzegorz Sokol:This race should have been a lock. The other main candidate running for president, Karl Nowrotsky, was a baby-faced crazy person who'd never even run for office, much less the presidency.

18:41Noel King:A man who didn't just court scandal, he married it.

18:44Miles Bryan:In March, it emerged that he had appeared on a TV show in disguise, blurred out and using a pseudonym to promote a book he had written about the life of a gangster. Then, last month, it was revealed he lied about acquiring a second apartment, the circumstances of which involved taking advantage of an elderly pensioner. But when it recently came out that he took part in a brawl in Gdansk involving 140 rival football hooligans, Nowrowski described the fight as a form of noble combat. Karol Nowrowski has taken to X to deny media reports he helped procure prostitutes for guests while working at a hotel.

19:19Noel King:It must have felt like a lock for the mayor. Poland wanted sober leadership and that was him.

19:25Grzegorz Sokol:But still, Poland's a pretty divided country, so the mayor hedged. He backed away from the left and towards the center. The idea was to ease up on support for the gay community and immigrants and refugees in order to pick up more voters in the middle.

19:38Noel King:This did not work.

19:41Miles Bryan:Karl Nowrowski has won Poland's presidential election. Nowrowski took just under 51 percent of the vote.

19:48Grzegorz Sokol:This is a major sit back for the liberals and the centrists. A key part of Raffles base, including young activists like Dominika Lasota, abandoned him.

19:57Noel King:Do you regret?

19:58Miles Bryan:that you didn't activate around? Oh, no, no. I mean, the fact that Nowrowski came into power was not, you know, it's not on us that we didn't mobilize. They thought that if they're going to be more right-wing than the right-wingers, they will pull in the right-wing voters to their sides. Well, guess what? If you are more right-wing than the right-wingers, you will lose your core base. That's what happened. They lost the young, they lost the women.

20:25Noel King:Respectfully, do you look at the U.S. elections and think Kamala Harris and I have a lot in common?

20:32Miles Bryan:Well, it's hard to say because, you know, we've been preparing for this election for many, many months and we were leading a very, very active campaign. And somehow, you know, the people who vote for populists do not have that many qualms. They do not ask themselves so many questions. You know, they just vote for the guy who's closest to them. Whereas our side is always prevaricating, asking questions. They're not too happy with the candidate because he or she is not 100 % their candidate. I mean, you know, I mean, at the end of the day, I can say it now. I mean, let's all grow up.

21:05Noel King:Hmm. I feel for Mr. Mayor. But let's all grow up is not really a winning political message.

21:13Grzegorz Sokol:On abortion, Polish liberals had tried to move carefully and legally. And their own voters punished them for it. Long Justice Party supporters must have been stoked. If everyone's mad at the liberals, that's a glide path back to power. Right?

21:29Noel King:It was about a thousand degrees below zero in the town of Mints Mazowiecki. This is a town far more conservative than Warsaw, where we'd heard the farmer's market was pretty lively. Although by the time we got there, most people had gone home. Wow, it's so over. No one was out except for a man named Kuba, who was packing up for the day.

21:48Grzegorz Sokol:Trying to do a story about Polish politics and how people are voting. Can we talk to you for a minute? He's 32, father of two, lives in a little village nearby.

22:01Grzegorz Sokol:We do farm, we have a family farm, and we're selling vegetables from our farm.

22:05Noel King:Small family farm, two kids. We expected to hear that he likes law and justice.

22:11Grzegorz Sokol:That was not what happened. He said law and justice and the libs feel like the same evil these days. It's not exactly like that, but I think there is something to it. Kuba told us he does like Karol Nowrowski, the soccer brawl-loving new president of Poland. But he loves this new guy on the scene. Gregor's Brown. You know, one thing is like they don't steal, they're not involved in any scandals, so they seem clean. This was kind of an oh shit moment. Cuba likes Gregor's Brown. Gregor's Brown isn't law and justice. He is farther right. Way farther right.

22:43Miles Bryan:The trial of the highly disruptive and inflammatory Polish MAP Gregorz Brown has begun in Warsaw. The list of accusations is long. We are being blackmailed by the Holocaust Toast scary tale repeated here again and again.

23:02Noel King:Brown is maybe best well known for mainstreaming something that had been confined to dog whistles in Polish political life. Anti-Semitism. In 2023, during Hanukkah, Brown blew out the candles of a menorah in the lobby of Poland's parliament building.

23:17Grzegorz Sokol:With a fire extinguisher.

23:19Noel King:Brown has denied that the Nazis used gas chambers at Auschwitz and says he's just asking questions about how many Jews actually died in Poland's concentration camps.

23:28Grzegorz Sokol:Law and Justice aligned figures towed the line on anti-Semitism when they were in power, but they never went full on Holocaust denialism.

23:35Noel King:And the scary part is rather than turning voters off, Brown's party and his paranoia are being embraced and defended.

23:46Miles Bryan:I don't think there's discrimination against anyone. They're just trying to protect their country, you know. And in terms of, you know, Brown, yeah, he doesn't, I guess he doesn't like that kind of impact. So, you know, he doesn't like Jews. That's why people think that he's an anti-Semite. I think Jews are a problem. That's why Brown doesn't like them. What is happening here?

24:05Grzegorz Sokol:It turns out a lot of conservative law and justice voters are moving to the right in a way that's going to sound familiar to Americans.

24:11Noel King:Yeah, life is expensive. Housing, kids. Inflation has been a wild ride. Refugees from Ukraine's war are pouring into Poland. And Law and Justice had eight years in power, but the problems remain. So all this wild eccentric has to do is call himself anti-establishment and he becomes a political force.

24:30Grzegorz Sokol:And people are open to this new guy's far-right extremes. Longest has spent years winking at anti-Semitism, embracing homophobia, demonizing their political enemies. That's where it's moving now. What used to be fringe is becoming more mainstream. Brown is currently on trial for putting out the menorah. And he's campaigning off of it. He refers to his supporters as the fire extinguisher movement. Seriously. And still, his party is going up in the polls.

25:00Noel King:Meanwhile, over on the left, frustration about the liberals with their polished candidates who speak five languages and can't get anything done because they want to play by the rules of democracy has hollowed out their support.

25:10Grzegorz Sokol:Because you could imagine another liberal government in 10 years on a line coming out of another conservative period in Poland, trying to make these changes and facing the same problem. So like strategically, what bothers you the most? What could you live with? How do you weigh this stuff?

25:25Miles Bryan:Well, I don't think that's the right question to ask. I think that what happened was that, and I see, and this is what's happening with a lot of like liberals or centrists around the world these days, that they are constantly just, you know, everything that they have to offer to the people is fighting against the even worse guys, right? So Democrats, yes, vote for us because we're going to abolish Trump. And then when you talk to them or when you talk to Donald Tusk's people and ask them, OK, so once you abolish the bad guys, what is it that you're going to offer to this nation? What kind of vision you have for this nation?

26:11Noel King:Poland got its democracy back. It wasn't easy. And as it turns out, it wasn't nearly the end.

26:17Grzegorz Sokol:Because what is democracy? It's people voting. It's politicians figuring out how to get people to vote for them. So they make promises. They get things done. Or maybe they can't get things done. And so they appeal to our worst impulses instead.

26:31Noel King:Democracy is also rallying against that in the streets and then at the ballot box. It's a fight.

26:37Grzegorz Sokol:Maybe one that never ends. But the lesson from Poland is you have to give people a reason to show up for the battle.

26:54Noel King:Miles Bryan produced today's episode. Jolie Myers edited. Patrick Boyd and David Tattashore engineered. And Andrea Lopez-Crusado checked the facts. Thanks so much to Gregor Sokol, our fixer and Warsaw producer, for his insights into Poland's past and present and for all the great stories. I'm Noelle King. And I'm Miles Bryan.

27:12Grzegorz Sokol:This is Today Explained.

27:37you you

27:47Amazon opens the door for a professional development.

27:47Miles Bryan:At Amazon, I get every year 4.500€ for a professional development. I started in the logistics center and knew I could be able to build. For example in robotics. So my job is a career. Amazon opens the door with up to 4.500€ for a professional development. It's the same for the employment.