Abstract
As the Polish experience demonstrates, populists can become a genuine challenge for democracy. This raises the question of whether and how democracy can defend itself when a majority populist government holds power. Data on initiatives opposing the Law and Justice government between 2015 and 2020 show that a ‘pincer movement’ of opposition emerged. It involved a combination of initiatives from international and domestic actors, including civil society and EU actors. Yet we do not know much about how these actors interact to put pressure on populists in power. By using the concept of Europeanisation and social movement theories, we analyse how and why non-governmental organisations reoriented their opposition to the rule of law crisis in Poland at the European level. We analyse NGOs’ strategies and argue that three factors help to explain the Europeanisation of the opposition to populist party: the changing multi-level structure of opportunities and threats, the construction of national and transnational coalition for democratic defence as well as NGOs’ common pro-European frame and their commitment to democratic values. The article applies a thematic content analysis based on press articles and semi-structured interviews conducted with Polish NGOs.
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Notes
The PiS government constituted a three-party coalition called United Right. PiS was the dominant party, while Poland Together (PR) and Solidarity Poland (SP) played a secondary role in policy making (Domagała and Zieliński 2020, p. 142).
According to Variety of Democracy index, it has dropped since 2015 from 0.94 to 0.76 in 2021. For comparison, this index was 0.64 in the 1980 during the communist period.
See Bourne’s contribution to this Special Issue.
See other contributions in this Special Issue.
By expert organisations, we mean those with expertise in a particular subject area. Street organisations, on the other hand, focus on social mobilisation around specific issues.
In case of Committee for the Defence of Democracy (KOD), we used materials available on the organisation website, press reports and scholarly literature.
It has been one of the most popular newspapers in Poland for years (Onet, RMF FM and WP…, 2022). In 2019, was recognised as the most opinion-forming media in Poland based on the number of citations (Most opinion-making media…, 2019). We realise that this is a left-wing newspaper, but this has the potential to capture as many reactions as possible from actors opposing the populist authority.
A detailed analysis of the collected data can be found in the ‘pincer movement’ section.
As some interviewees requested their anonymity in the paper, we only use the names of the organisations.
For each type of oppositional reactions, the percentage of all 489 coded reactions was calculated.
The European rule of law mechanism is tool aiming to prevent challenges from emerging or deteriorating. It provides a process for dialogue between EU and Member States and is a step prior to Article 7 TEU.
Art. 7 TEU is a procedure leading to suspend certain rights from a member state. It begins with a proposal to find a “Clear Risk of Serious Breach” (7.1). In the event of a ‘serious and persistent breach’, the European Council decides unanimously to proceed further (7.2). The Council then votes by qualified majority to suspend rights of the accused country, including voting rights within the Council, until all duties are fulfilled (7.3).
By means of it, the Commission can react to the states failing to implement EU rules or infringing EU law. By a decision of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), a state could be charged with a financial penalty.
‘Member states should provide remedies sufficient to ensure effective legal protection in the fields covered by Union Law”, Kovacs and Scheppele (2018), p. 12.
The Commission challenged the Polish state in court in 2018—law on the Ordinary Courts and the Supreme Court, in 2020—the Disciplinary Chamber of the Supreme Court and the ‘Muzzle Law’, in 2021—the Polish Constitutional Tribunal and its case law. This is referred to by law scholars as the ‘awakening of the supranational system’ (Barcz et al. 2021, p. 35).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Angela Bourne, Tore Vincents Olsen, Bénédicte Laumond, Anthoula Malkopoulou, Patrick Nitzschner, Juha Tuovinen, Franciszek Tyszka, Francesco Campo, Mathias Holst Nicolaisen, Anna-Sophie Heinze, and 2 anonymous reviewers for Comparative European Politics for comments on earlier versions of this paper. All errors are our responsibility.
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This research was in part financed by the Carlsberg Foundation Grant CF20-0008.
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Moroska-Bonkiewicz, A., Domagała, K. Opposing populists in power: how and why Polish civil society Europeanised their opposition to the rule of law crisis in Poland. Comp Eur Polit 21, 817–833 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-023-00339-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-023-00339-3