In the late afternoon of October 19, 2017, a man walked into Warsaw’s central square and set himself on fire. He had first scattered flyers that began with the words “I, an ordinary, gray person,” and warned of the danger posed by Law and Justice (PiS), the right-wing populist party that took over Poland’s presidency and parliament in 2015.

The gray person was Piotr Szczęsny, a fifty-four-year-old chemist and consultant. His manifesto accused the country’s leaders of betraying the legacy of Solidarity and condemned PiS for, among other things, taking control of Poland’s judiciary and media, violating its constitution, and discriminating against immigrants, women, the queer community, and Muslims. Szczęsny declared that PiS and Jarosław Kaczyński—a member of parliament as well as the party’s mastermind—had “blood on their hands.” He ended with a call to resist: “Wake up! It’s not too late!”

Szczęsny died ten days later. In a posthumously released open letter, he acknowledged that he suffered from depression but emphasized that his suicide was a political act. There had been many protests against PiS in the previous two years, but his death captured like nothing else the anger and grief that many Poles felt about their country’s authoritarian turn. After PiS lost its majority in the parliamentary elections of October 2023, Donald Tusk, the country’s new prime minister, read Szczęsny’s manifesto aloud in the Sejm (Poland’s lower house of parliament) to herald a new era. The elections had a turnout of more than 74 percent—the highest since Poland regained independence in 1989. Poles, it seemed, had woken up in time.

That awakening was unexpected. Under Kaczyński, Poland had been consigned by many observers to the growing ranks of autocracies, led by Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes’s influential book The Light That Failed (2020) characterized Poland as part of an “inevitable” regional boomerang against the West’s imposition of liberal democracy and free markets after the end of the cold war, which had forced Central and Eastern Europeans to play the humiliating part of errant pupils. Meanwhile, right-wing populists around the world hailed the Polish example. In spring 2023, when Benjamin Netanyahu’s advisers sought to bring Israel’s courts to heel, they consulted with PiS on how to do it.

For Poles who had gathered at demonstrations or simply read the news in resignation, reversing Poland’s trajectory seemed like a quixotic dream—until suddenly, in the fall of 2023, it wasn’t. Younger voters especially, angered by the country’s flagging economy and increased restrictions on reproductive rights, rejected PiS and handed power to its rivals.

Then came another surprise. While PiS had lost control of parliament, it still held the presidency. To truly undo the damage, the new ruling coalition needed its candidate, Warsaw’s liberal mayor, Rafał Trzaskowski, to win the presidential elections in 2025. But on June 1, after months of polling that showed Trzaskowski with a comfortable lead, he lost to Karol Nawrocki, a historian who nominally ran as an independent but had the clear backing of PiS. In 2017 the party had made him the director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, originally intended to explore both German and Polish civilians’ experiences but reenvisioned under PiS as a monument to Polish heroism. He then became head of the Institute of National Remembrance, where he fired staff who criticized PiS’s chauvinist vision of the past.

The Trump administration had publicly endorsed Nawrocki and hosted him at the White House before the election. After Trump-aligned candidates lost presidential bids in Canada and Romania, Trump crowed over this much-needed sign of international support. “Congratulations to Poland, you have chosen a WINNER!” he wrote on Truth Social. (In September Nawrocki made another pilgrimage to the White House, where he was treated to a military flyover that drowned out a news conference being held by several Jeffrey Epstein victims on the Capitol steps.)

The country’s democratic restoration has gotten stuck halfway, leaving Poles, and international observers, asking questions. How did PiS gain near-complete control, only to lose it—and then get a shot at winning it back? And what does the Polish case suggest about countries seeking an off-ramp from autocracy?

In the 1962 Polish children’s film The Two Who Stole the Moon a pair of towheaded boys devise a scheme to do just that. The mischievous heroes are played by identical twins, Jarosław and Lech Kaczyński (whose uncle recommended them for the role). Raised in Warsaw, the boys grew up to be lawyers and, in the 1970s, joined Solidarity, the trade union movement that united a variety of ideologies with the shared goal of resisting Poland’s Soviet-backed regime, which declared martial law in 1981. Lech, a much higher-ranking member of Solidarity than Jarosław, was held in an internment camp for almost a year.

Lech later cited the patriotic Polish Socialist Party (PPS), to which the twins’ family was connected, as inspiration for his career in politics. The PPS had arisen under Russian rule in the late nineteenth century and called for socioeconomic equality as well as national independence; the Bolsheviks’ 1919–1921 invasion of Poland was thwarted by PPS’s most famous member, Józef Piłsudski. Yet the Kaczyńskis’ father, a veteran of the Warsaw Uprising against Nazi occupation, did not see the brothers’ political careers as honoring the family tradition: before his death in 2005, he told a friend and fellow uprising veteran that he asked God to “protect Poland from my lunatic sons.”

In early 1989 Jarosław was forty years old, unemployed, and living with his parents. Lech was working with the Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa in Gdańsk. Changing times brought new opportunities. That spring the opposition began meeting with government officials, who’d grown amenable to negotiation amid severe economic crisis and rising social discontent. The meetings led to partially free elections in June 1989 in which Solidarity candidates persuaded other parties to break their coalition with the Communists, leaving the latter unable to form a government—a stunning end to Communist rule in Poland, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Both the Kaczyńskis ran for parliament that year, and both won.

But in the 1990s the twins found themselves marginalized, as voters reeling from mass unemployment brought on by “shock therapy” economic reforms began backing politicians who had served in the old regime. Even though the Kaczyńskis had taken part in the negotiations with the Communist government, they began to denounce the talks as a dirty plot to keep Communist elites in power. Then, in the early 2000s, politicians from the ruling Democratic Left Alliance, which secured EU membership for Poland in 2003, faced a corruption scandal that created a political opening to their right.

In 2001 the Kaczyński brothers founded PiS, while their future nemesis Donald Tusk, a charismatic politician from Gdańsk, established Civic Platform. All three men were former participants in Solidarity who talked of restoring Christian ideals. While Civic Platform emphasized economic deregulation and individual rights, PiS promised social benefits and national pride. The strategy paid off when the affable, outgoing Lech Kaczyński won the presidency in 2005, and his more reclusive twin became prime minister. But in a surprise move, Tusk refused to ally with them, arguing that PiS’s insistence on controlling crucial positions and ministries was an abuse of power—the start of the schism between the two parties. PiS turned instead to populist and far-right parties to form a coalition that fell apart after only two years; then the party veered even more to the right, eating up its smaller partners.

In 2010 Lech Kaczyński, who was running for reelection, embarked on a state visit to Smolensk, Russia, to commemorate the Soviet Union’s 1940 execution of tens of thousands of Polish officers and prisoners of war. Almost a hundred people accompanied him on the presidential plane. Fog blanketed Smolensk as they approached; the pilots debated what to do. After Lech had a phone call with his twin, his team apparently urged them to land. The plane crashed, killing everyone on board. Though some believe that Jarosław’s final words to his brother (which remain unknown) may have contributed to that disastrous decision, he promoted a conspiracy theory that Tusk had planned the crash with Putin. Later that year Jarosław ran in his brother’s place and lost.

Since then, he has stayed mostly behind the scenes. After his mother died in 2013, he was left living alone with his cat; as he grew increasingly isolated and paranoid, he began to use more extreme rhetoric. In 2015, when some 1.3 million refugees claimed asylum in Europe and the Polish government agreed to accept several thousand of them, Kaczyński described migrants as carrying “all sorts of parasites and protozoa.” Thanks in part to the complacency of the liberal incumbent, Andrzej Duda pulled off a surprise win for PiS in the 2015 presidential election, which was followed by the party’s victory in parliamentary elections that fall. After Orbán’s 2010 victory in Hungary, Kaczyński had declared that “the day will come when there will be Budapest in Warsaw.” When that day came, however, there was an important difference: while Orbán’s Fidesz won a majority big enough to change the constitution, PiS didn’t. So Kaczyński set about violating it.

Jarosław Kaczyński had long placed what he saw as the national interest above all else. When he was studying for a Ph.D. in law in the 1970s his adviser, Stanisław Ehrlich, drew inspiration from the work of Carl Schmitt, the legal philosopher of sovereign power admired by the Third Reich as well as by today’s international antidemocratic right. In a 2017 interview Kaczyński praised Schmitt’s “realistic” view of politics, and he has said, among other things, that courts have no right to check the actions of the nation, which is embodied by PiS.

One of PiS’s first moves was to illegally pack Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, whose fifteen members decide whether other branches of government are acting in accordance with the constitution. (In 2007 the tribunal had overturned sections of Kaczyński’s lustration law, which would have forced members of certain professions, including teachers and journalists, to make public confessions about whether they had ever collaborated with the Communist secret police.) PiS put additional pressure on the judiciary by lowering the retirement age for judges on the Supreme Court, establishing a new “disciplinary chamber” for them, and illegally dismissing or relocating them to provincial courts. PiS also replaced more than fifty journalists working in public television and radio with party hacks, used the state media regulator to punish private media critical of the government, and bought out dozens of regional publications through PKN Orlen, a state-owned oil company.

PiS paired its assault on the courts and the press with a multifront culture war. As part of its mission to create a more “patriotic” public sphere, it reduced the pensions of former employees of the Communist security services (in a law that was later overturned by the Supreme Court) and eliminated street names and monuments associated with communism, including memorials to the Red Army. The party replaced what Kaczyński called “the pedagogy of shame” about Polish history with a vision of the nation as perpetually martyred by foreign enemies and internal traitors: namely Communists, liberals, and anyone who had ever crossed the Kaczyńskis—above all Wałęsa, who had a falling-out with the brothers while he was president in the early 1990s and went on to become a vocal critic of PiS.

There is no shortage of theories to explain PiS’s popularity. The essay collection Democratic Backsliding in Poland: Why Has Poland Gone to the Dark Side? (2023), written during PiS’s rule but published after its parliamentary defeat, argues that Poland’s democracy never fully dawned. According to its editors, the political scientists Łukasz Zamęcki, Renata Mieńkowska-Norkiene, and Adam Szymański, after 1989 the country did not develop a “strong democratic culture and consolidated democratic institutions,” while Poles who felt left behind had little chance to absorb the “values of liberal democracy.” The editors did not expect that Poland’s backsliding could be reversed anytime soon, and argued that restoring democratic values would demand “substantial changes in the political culture of Poles.” Yet the unprecedented number of voters who turned out to support PiS’s opponents in 2023 suggests that Poland’s democracy is more resilient than they thought, and that its citizens are no less civic-minded than those of other countries.

For the political scientist Jarosław Kuisz, the secret to PiS’s victory lies deeper in the country’s history, with its centuries of bloodshed and foreign occupation. In The New Politics of Poland (2023), Kuisz argues that “Poland’s political culture is permeated by the trauma of the erasure of the state from the map,” breeding a pathology that he calls “post-traumatic sovereignty.” Its symptoms include the “habit of seeing other countries as potential occupiers,” “a sense of alienation from authority and its laws,” and “difficult normality” (a thirst for drama that drives Euroskepticism). But Kuisz’s damning appraisal is unable to explain why Polish politics tack in one direction or another, or why countries with far different histories have also been drawn to right-wing populism. It is unclear what sort of therapy Poles would need to go through in order to recover from ancestral suffering, or how that recovery might be expressed in policy.

Others have argued that Poland’s veer to the right was a proletarian reaction to neoliberal reform—which is hard to square with the fact that after Poland joined the EU, it turned into the region’s strongest post-Communist economy, with a skyrocketing GDP and an impressive rise in living standards, real wages, and average national income. Though Krastev and Holmes identify the “trauma” of labor migration from Central and Eastern to Western Europe as a significant factor in support for illiberal parties, in the 2010s the number of Poles leaving to work abroad declined. By 2016 more people were relocating to Poland than emigrating. Overwhelming public support for NATO and EU membership—which even PiS shares, though its leaders have questioned the primacy of European over Polish law—casts doubt on the idea that Poles took revenge against the West for its condescending tutelage.

Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment (2021), by Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk, highlights a critical element of PiS’s success—and of its decline (which occurred after the book’s publication)—that the other analysts underestimate. PiS politicians join the Polish Catholic Church in condemning “gender” and “LGBT ideology” as threats to the nation and its Christian principles. Graff and Korolczuk call this “masculinist identity politics” and argue that its rhetoric allows it to transcend class divides.

In 2016 PiS introduced a draft law proposed by Ordo Iuris, a conservative Catholic organization, that included prison terms for women who get abortions. After conservative groups inveighed against the Istanbul Convention on ending violence against women, PiS took steps to withdraw Poland from the treaty. Graff and Korolczuk note the cynicism with which PiS politicians deploy the idea of “family values.” (After the party’s 2015 comeback, it did boost social benefits by providing payouts to families with children and lowering the retirement age, but it also eliminated state funding for IVF.) Such cynicism would certainly seem to include Kaczyński, who is a lifelong bachelor. Though several politicians have made veiled references to Kaczyński’s possible homosexuality—including Robert Biedroń, Poland’s first openly gay member of parliament, who while speaking about closeted politicians in 2017 said that “everything would be fine if they would just pet their cat and not interfere in other people’s lives”—the subject is generally taboo. A book billed as a “nonpolitical biography” of Jarosław’s “secrets” doesn’t mention it.¹

The Church, a driving force in Polish politics since the 1970s, has been a major factor behind PiS’s success. Though the Solidarity movement swept up people of various stripes, its primary identity was Catholic, nationalist, and patriarchal—as the cultural historian Marcin Kościelniak’s recent book Aborcja i demokracja (Abortion and Democracy) documents. Eager to co-opt the Church’s moral authority, especially under the beloved Polish pope John Paul II (who made a 1979 pilgrimage to his homeland that galvanized the opposition), Solidarity-aligned intellectuals joined working-class Poles in connecting “Christian values” with Polishness, and Polishness with opposing abortion.

In 1980–1981, when Solidarity was at its height, its strikes featured daily Masses, and its publications often included antiabortion material. (At the time the Church itself, which enjoyed a generally positive relationship with Poland’s authorities, took an ambiguous stance; Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński called for the strikes to end.) Though women were essential in maintaining Solidarity’s underground networks, its public face was almost entirely male (a gender imbalance common among dissident movements in the Eastern Bloc).² Solidarity’s ultimate victory empowered the Church at the cost of women’s rights, replacing state socialism—which included abortion access—with “nonsecular democracy,” as Kościelniak puts it. In addition to passing a 1993 law that banned abortion with only a few exceptions, legislators granted the Church generous subsidies from the state budget and the right to teach religion in public schools. Center-left politicians tried to undo the abortion ban, without success.

Solidarity voters were a crucial early constituency for PiS, which held on to the allegiance of most practicing Catholics—some 30 percent of Poles attend religious services regularly—even after it began violating the constitution. Though the Church had sometimes backed liberal causes—including, at John Paul II’s insistence, EU accession—from the early 2000s it gradually silenced its own progressive voices in the country. The right wings of Solidarity and the Church converged, culminating in PiS’s sweeping victory.

The party’s symbiotic relationship with the Church helped it consolidate power but also provoked a backlash. Far fewer Poles go to church now than in 1989, with the greatest decline in attendance among young people. In 2016, when PiS attempted to further tighten abortion restrictions, women dressed in black led nationwide demonstrations. The Black Protests, as they became known, challenged the pact with the Church that almost all politicians had accepted, while targeting the right as a corrupt elite. Polls showed that a majority of the country (58 percent) backed the protesters, and PiS dropped the abortion law—its first major defeat.

In 2020, however, PiS imposed new limits on abortion through the Constitutional Tribunal, which declared abortion illegal in the case of fetal abnormalities. Since about 98 percent of abortions in Poland were carried out on this basis, for conditions including Down syndrome, the ruling effectively eliminated all legal abortion. The protests that broke out that autumn were the country’s biggest since 1989. Demonstrators adopted a red lightning bolt symbol and chanted a simple message: “Fuck off.” A few groups disrupted Masses and vandalized churches. Protests erupted even in tiny provincial towns that were considered PiS strongholds. Seventy percent of Poles expressed support for the demonstrations.

The impact of the women’s protests is often disregarded. Kuisz acknowledges their “size and energy” but calls them politically insignificant because they “did not translate into any solid political structure.” Yet they were directly responsible for PiS’s loss in 2023: after the 2020 demonstrations the party’s support abruptly dropped from 40 percent (the amount that PiS needed to build a ruling coalition) to under 30 percent, and it did not recover. The party had failed to crush independent media, which aired constant criticisms, and Tusk’s 2021 return to Poland after serving as the head of the European Council helped reinvigorate Civic Platform. Poland’s economy also shrank during the Covid-19 pandemic, and PiS’s rivals associated the ruling party with inflation. But feminist fury was the engine of its decline.

Tusk had vowed to clean up after PiS with an “iron broom,” and he made some initial progress. He took the public media out of PiS’s control, unlocked billions of euros in EU funds that had been withheld because of the government’s violation of rule-of-law regulations, and withdrew PiS’s challenge to the Istanbul Convention. Other plans, however, stalled. Parliamentary commissions set up to investigate several major PiS scandals (including its use of the spyware program Pegasus to monitor opposition politicians and journalists) have yet to produce any results. Though two top PiS officials were arrested in early 2024 for abuses committed during the party’s earlier years in power, within weeks they were pardoned by Duda and released. Two others facing arrest warrants fled to Hungary.

Tusk’s bloc had promised two major social reforms—relaxing the abortion ban and introducing civil partnerships for gay couples—but didn’t deliver on either. Though Duda would certainly have vetoed an abortion law, Tusk wasn’t even able to pass one. These failures fed disillusionment among the people who’d gotten his party into power. Last winter I had lunch with a friend in Warsaw, an academic in her early thirties who took part in the women’s protests and supported Tusk’s coalition. When I told her that some Americans saw Poland as an inspiration, she burst out laughing.

The first round of voting in the presidential election, which took place in May, showed clear momentum in favor of several very different antiestablishment candidates, especially among young people. Voters in their twenties favored Sławomir Mentzen of Confederation Liberty and Independence, a far-right neoliberal coalition that is Poland’s closest equivalent to MAGA, and Adrian Zandberg, a leftist candidate whose party has refused to work with Tusk’s government, over the much better-known Trzaskowski. Together the candidates associated with the two major parties got 60.9 percent of the vote, the least in any presidential election since 1990.

It was a campaign driven by gender. The right depicted Trzaskowski, who has walked in Pride parades in Warsaw, as the effete “Rainbow Rafał,” while Nawrocki, a former boxer, did push-ups in a suit and declared himself a man of “blood and bone” (the Polish idiom for “red-blooded male”). The torrent of compromising information that came out about Nawrocki’s past—the second apartment he obtained under seemingly dubious circumstances, his reported provision of escorts for guests when he worked as a hotel security guard, his participation in a street brawl as a football hooligan—only strengthened his tough-guy image. Though he was handpicked by Kaczyński and campaigned on PiS’s dime, his official status as an independent gave him a vaguely alternative aura that appealed to the new alt-right while maintaining the loyalty of PiS’s base. Trzaskowski, like Kamala Harris, made an awkward play for the center that turned off some progressives.

In the second round of voting Nawrocki received 50.89 percent to Trzaskowski’s 49.11 percent—the smallest margin of victory in a presidential election since Poland regained independence. Voter turnout in the presidential runoff was lower than it had been in the 2023 parliamentary elections. Young people and women had handed victory to Civic Platform in 2023, and their disappointment is why the party’s candidate lost in 2025. Nawrocki’s victory might seem to substantiate the argument that Poland has failed to develop a robust democracy, but the race’s closeness suggests a situation more akin to the one now roiling the United States, where supporters of constitutional governance and their opponents are about evenly divided. Poland is not more burdened by a traumatic past than any other country; the challenges it faces in beating back the illiberal tide are all too common.

A few days after he lost the election, Trzaskowski unveiled new benches and greenery on the square in front of Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science, a neo-Gothic Soviet skyscraper. The renovations included a tribute to the “gray man,” whose opening words are now carved in stone on the spot where he immolated himself. The irony of Szczęsny’s manifesto, which saw PiS as disloyal to the original Solidarity, is that PiS could just as easily be seen as a consequence of Solidarity’s alliance with the Church. Szczęsny insisted on care for those outside the national Catholic community—a more expansive form of solidarity than that of 1980. This vision was crystallized in the women’s protests of 2020. The grassroots networks they created have continued advocating for abortion access, LGBTQ rights, and support for migrants.

When it comes to extending protections and upholding the law, however, Civic Platform has felt the need to borrow from its rival in order to compete with it. Last winter Tusk violated Poland’s constitution by suspending the right to apply for asylum for migrants and refugees—mostly from the Global South—who enter Poland through its border with Belarus. He has also reinstated controls on Poland’s borders with Germany and Lithuania to stop “the uncontrolled flow of migrants.” During his campaign Trzaskowski echoed the anti-Ukrainian rhetoric of Nawrocki and other candidates by saying that he would limit Ukrainians’ access to social benefits.

Though Poland has shown how supporters of democracy can unite to defeat aspiring autocrats, it also demonstrates how they might lose their mandate by failing to fully distinguish themselves from their opponents. Nawrocki’s victory is a warning that if this lesson isn’t learned soon, illiberal populists might return to power—perhaps as early as 2027, when the next parliamentary elections could bring PiS back to a majority. As of early 2026, Civic Coalition was leading in the polls, while support for PiS was dropping. Nevertheless, Kaczyński has predicted “a great victory for the patriotic camp”—which means whoever will submit to his will.