The new government of Poland ran an election campaign touting the “rule of law” and antidotes to “democratic backsliding.” It was enough to win — or, at least, not to lose. As no major parliamentary ally was willing to help top finisher Law & Justice (PiS) secure a third term, three opposition party coalitions cobbled together a government and took office this month.

“The whole of Poland, the whole of Europe and the whole world sees how strong we are and how we are ready to fight for democracy and freedom again, like we did 30, 40 years ago,” said then-opposition leader Donald Tusk at a campaign protest march this summer. Just one week after beginning his second stint as prime minister, Tusk’s government indeed evoked memories of that era. On Dec. 20, Poles witnessed a broad-daylight coup at TVP, the state broadcaster. 

Storming Free-Speech

Police stormed the building where journalists and politicians affiliated with PiS were protesting the previous day’s unceremonious mass layoffs at TVP, Polish Radio, and the Polish Press Agency. Exterior photos show the area cordoned under heavy police presence. TVP Info and English-language TVP World (Poland’s answer to English programming from Deutsche Welle or France 24), both prominent news channels, suddenly ceased transmissions.

The new government is citing a legal loophole that allows the Minister of Culture to act as the state treasury’s sole agent, thereby circumventing the legal process for appointing and removing boards of government bodies. (READ MORE: Dutch Citizens Reject Anti-Racist Saint Nicholas Celebrations)

Tusk defended the episode as “restoring legal order and common decency in public life.” Former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, among the political opponents the new government has promised to prosecute in a state tribunal, lamented “how the authorities who supposedly care about the rule of law violate it every step. And they have ruled for only a week…”

It will likely take some time to learn exactly what transpired inside the chaotic TVP headquarters, but it certainly had no relation to what one might think of as “rule of law.” It is the latest signal that the liberal figures directing the new government, though far from enjoying an electoral mandate, won’t be patient in transforming the country.

The New Government in Poland Wants to Promote Leftist Ideology

Left-wing activist Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bąk was appointed Minister of Family, Labor, and Social Policy and immediately stirred controversy by wearing a shirt on which an umbrella shields a figure from a deluge of Christian crosses. A newly created Minister for Equality suggests a healthy dose of Western identity posturing. One Left MP claimed President Andrzej Duda will be among those punished for asserting LGBT is “only ideology” (her phrase, not Duda’s) if a proposed “hate speech” law comes into effect. Abortion will remain a hot topic. It’s all rather forced in Catholic Poland.

A Pole, appropriately enough, has been among the most notable chroniclers of this hyper-liberal, anti-democratic phenomenon. Politician and philosopher Ryszard Legutko details the links between communism and liberal democracy — and the seamless transition of politicians from the former to the latter — in his book The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, published in English in 2016. (READ MORE: United States Policy in the Balkans Needs to Change)

“If a thing, a quality, an attitude, an idea is not modern, it should be modernized or will end up in the dustbin of history,” Legutko writes of the liberal-democratic worldview. “This was a reason why the former communists, who for so many decades had been fighting for progress against the forces of backwardness, so quickly found allies in liberal democracy.”

Supporting Legutko’s assessment is a curious condition of the new government: for the first time, a political offshoot of the Solidarity movement (Tusk’s Civic Coalition) shares a government with a political offshoot of the communist-era Polish United Workers’ Party (the Left coalition). 

“Poland shook off the communist yoke at a time when the Western world had already reached a phase of considerable homogeneity and standardization,” notes Legutko. “Therefore as soon as the Poles liberated themselves and started aspiring to the liberal-democratic world, Poland lost its exotic charm as a country in which workers, intellectuals, and priests defied communism, prayed to God, and risked their freedom in defense of truth, good, and beauty. The liberal-democratic world did not want such exoticism in their midst.”

Undemocratic Means in Poland

Predictably, then, the European political apparatus is thrilled by the recent events. The European Commission unfroze €111 billion of withheld funds as a result of Tusk returning to power, not contingent on any policy actions. Die Tageszeitung, Die Zeit, and Süddeutsche Zeitung were among the German papers that celebrated Tusk’s return to Warsaw.

Earlier this month, German journalist Klaus Bachmann wrote in Berliner Zeitung, “This is the dilemma that the future Prime Minister Tusk will face when he takes over: He can become a powerless ruler or make the country democratic again using undemocratic means.” 

In Bachmann’s Germany, the political elite has renewed its own hyper-liberal, anti-democratic bid to ban the surging populist Alternative for Germany party. Democracy-minded politicians in both Warsaw and Berlin should notice that European popular opinion is unimpressed. (RELATED: A New Far-Left Dictatorship Is Coming to Europe)

Last month, Geert Wilders triggered Europe’s latest political earthquake by leading his populist Party for Freedom to victory in the Dutch parliamentary elections. In Spain, a post-election governing deal between the second-place socialists and exiled Catalan separatists triggered massive street protests that brought conservative figures like Tucker Carlson into the fray. In Ireland, a country that has undergone rapid social and demographic transformation in recent decades, citizens seem to have reached a breaking point, as long-suppressed immigration debates have recently proliferated.

The Right Needs Reinvention to Regain Power

The political Right enjoys in Poland a more prominent role than in any of those countries, as evidenced by eight years of PiS single-party rule and even this year’s disappointing “first-place” finish. Tusk’s Civic Coalition finished a full five points behind, and the reminted prime minister earned woeful approval ratings mirroring those of his outgoing PiS counterparts. The centrist Third Way coalition, whose overperformance sealed the election outcome, climbed to almost 20 percent support in a poll released just before the TVP fracas. 

Yet, PiS — if that is indeed to remain the primary vehicle of the Polish Right — requires reinvention. Its pettiness and bickering became cumbersome. It picked self-destructive fights that alienated even conservatives. It failed to articulate a meaningful electoral argument on migration and the economy, its “winning” issues. Yes, TVP’s programming — in theory a useful bulwark against left-leaning private media — became indefensibly tendentious and needed a shakeup (not a police invasion). Even the traditionalist agrarian Polish People’s Party wanted nothing to do with PiS. 

Such details are important for making sense of the liberal government’s calls for extreme measures, and they matter to the extent democracy still matters in liberal-democratic Europe. The Poles are about to learn to what extent that is the case. 

Michael O’Shea, a dual citizen of the United States and Poland, is a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute. He is an alumnus of the Budapest Fellowship Program, sponsored by the Hungary Foundation and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium. Follow him on X (Twitter): @Michael_F_OShea