Timothy Garton Ash
Poland,
the pivotal power in post-communist central Europe, is in danger of
being reduced by its recently elected ruling party to an illiberal
democracy.
Basic pillars of its still youthful liberal democracy, such as the constitutional court,public service broadcasters
and a professional civil service, are suddenly under threat. The voices
of all allied democracies, in Europe and across the Atlantic, must be
raised to express their concern about a turn with grave implications for
the whole democratic west.
And this needs to happen soon. For the political blitzkrieg of the
past two months suggests that the strategy of the Law and Justice party
(known by its Polish acronym as PiS), and specifically of its one true
leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski,
is to do the dirty work of transforming the political system rapidly,
even brutally, and then to show a kinder, softer, more pragmatic face.
He has the parliamentary majority to do this (although not the two
thirds needed to change the constitution), still considerable popular
support – and, shockingly, the president of the country is behaving like
his glove puppet.
For at least 20 years Kaczyński has dreamed of what he sees as completing the anti communist revolution of 1989,
but he also knows, recalling his experience in power from 2005 to 2007,
that the window of opportunity may not long be open. So he says to
himself, like Macbeth, “If it were done … then ’twere well it were done
quickly.”
Since what I have just written will be seen as partisan, unfair
criticism by many who voted for Kaczyński’s party in last autumn’s
election, let me state equally clearly what I am not saying. I am not
criticising a party with a clear parliamentary majority for
pushing through its proclaimed conservative, Catholic, Eurosceptic
policies, cleverly combined with an almost left wing set of economic and
welfare promises. I may not like those policies, but that’s democracy. I
have been for nearly 40 years now a friend of Poland,
not just of one milieu, let alone of any particular party. Among my
most moving memories is the vast crowd in front of the historic
monastery of Częstochowa greeting Pope John Paul II in 1983, and singing
the old patriotic hymn Return to Us, O Lord, Free our Fatherland.
Timothy Garton Ash
is the author of nine books of political writing or ‘history of the
present’ which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last
thirty years. He is Professor of European Studies in the University of
Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College,
Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford
University. His essays appear regularly in the
New York Review of Books and he writes a column on international affairs in the
Guardian which is widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas.
