He promised salvation for a country “in ruins” — an end to immigration, a civil service stripped of entrenched left-wing opponents, a judiciary purged of meddlesome judges and a news media giving voice to the people instead of elites.
Those campaign pledges — similar to ones made by Donald J. Trump during his successful bid for a second term as U.S. president — helped bring Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his nationalist Law and Justice party to power in Poland in 2015.
More than a year after an election that ended that party’s eight-year rule, its liberal successors are still struggling to undo the “new state apparatus” that Mr. Kaczynski helped put in place and that legal experts say seriously damaged Poland’s legal system.
Unwinding the legacy of populist conservative rule “takes longer than you expect,” said Adam Bodnar, the justice minister at the forefront of the new government’s efforts to reverse Poland’s retreat from liberal democracy under Law and Justice.
That retreat involved the politicization of Poland’s judiciary, a near total ban on abortion, the hijacking of public broadcasting for propaganda and a deep rift with the European Union.
Mr. Bodnar, speaking before the U.S. election, pointed to Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary as an example of the tenacity of right-wing populist rule. Future successors to Mr. Orban, in power since 2010 and an ally of Mr. Trump, Mr. Bodnar said, will face formidable obstacles. “I would be very afraid,” he added.
Mr. Kaczynski and Law and Justice are also fans of Mr. Trump, and the party’s legislators chanted his name in Parliament after he was elected again. The current government, led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who made no secret of his preference for Vice President Kamala Harris, offered the American president-elect polite congratulations.
Mr. Bodner said he was picking his way cautiously through a legal minefield left by the previous government. Many hazards have yet to be defused but, he added, “We now know exactly where all the mines are.”
When he took office, Mr. Bodnar brought back European Union flags to the Justice Ministry that his hard-line predecessor had banished.
But other changes, particularly the rebuilding of a court system that legal experts say was undermined by the previous government’s political agenda, have lagged, as have efforts by Poland’s coalition government to deliver on election promises to reverse the criminalization of nearly all abortions.
On the issue of immigration, the current government has dropped the inflammatory language of Mr. Kaczynski, who denounced migrants during the 2015 election campaign as carrying “parasites and protozoa.” But it has continued and even strengthened his hard-line stance, with Mr. Tusk announcing that Poland would suspend recognizing asylum requests.
Mr. Bodnar said the biggest obstacle to undoing what he sees as the damage done by Mr. Kaczynski’s party is Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda. Mr. Duda, elected separately, is a supporter of Law and Justice and has veto power over all legislation reversing changes made by Law and Justice when it was in power.
Those changes included the stacking of the Constitutional Tribunal and Supreme Court with right-wing loyalists, critics say.
“We know that with this president it will not be possible to make significant changes concerning the judiciary,” Mr. Bodnar said, and the only solution was “to wait for a new president” after elections in May.
Parliament is now controlled by a coalition of liberals, traditional conservatives and leftists. When it passed legislation in October to overhaul the constitutional court, Mr. Duda referred it for review — to the tribunal that was being targeted.
And when Mr. Bodnar, who is also prosecutor general, tried to replace the second-most senior official in the prosecutorial system, a holdover from the previous government, the president objected and the same court declared the move unconstitutional.
The setbacks highlighted the hurdles the center-right government has faced in trying to establish its electoral program in face of resistance from judges, prosecutors, state media executives and others appointed by Law and Justice.
Law and Justice left “the whole system wrapped in political ivy that is very, very difficult to remove,” said Jaroslaw Kuisz, the author of a book on the party’s push to take Poland in the same direction as Hungary under Mr. Orban.
“What is happening now is not just a normal change of government,” Mr. Kuisz added, but a “post-populist moment that can only be compared with the post-communist moment” after 1989. That was when Poland’s new democratic government had to rebuild institutions and the rule of law after decades of Communist Party rule.
While Polish Communists mostly adapted to the democratic order, Law and Justice and its appointees are fighting back, Mr. Kuisz said. “They don’t consider themselves defeated.” Mr. Trump’s election, he added, “will boost their energy to resist because they believe they are the avant-garde of history.”
Leading the resistance is Mr. Kaczynski, Law and Justice’s chairman.
“Today, unfortunately, we have to fight for a free Poland again,” Mr. Kaczynski said on Nov. 11 during an Independence Day speech, accusing Mr. Tusk of presiding over “the destruction of the country.”
After Law and Justice lost its parliamentary majority last October, Mr. Kaczynski joined a sit-in at a state broadcaster, TVP, in support of executives and journalists who, facing dismissal from jobs they owed to the previous government, had barricaded themselves into their offices and studios.
They claimed to be defending freedom of speech, an argument that largely fell flat given that the state broadcasting system had been turned into a bullhorn for right-wing propaganda.
Also fighting back hard has been the president of the Constitutional Tribunal, Julia Przylebska, an old friend of Mr. Kaczynski’s. She became president of the 15-member court in 2016 after Law and Justice appointed five new justices in violation of normal procedure. That set off street protests and led the European Court of Justice to rule that the tribunal had not been “established by law.”
The tribunal played a central role in cementing Law and Justice’s agenda, issuing rulings against abortion and the primacy of European Union law.
When Parliament passed resolutions this year demanding that Ms. Przylebska move on, along with other justices whose appointments were tainted by irregularities, she responded by vowing to hang on in a combative video posted on the tribunal’s website. Adding to a morass of uncertainty is a dispute over when her term as tribunal president ends. The government says it ended in 2022.
When the government in March stopped publishing her tribunal’s rulings in the official Legal Gazette, which meant they had no legal force, Ms. Przylebska started publishing them herself on her court’s website, saying that made them valid.
Mr. Bodnar has faced criticism both for moving too quickly and too slowly. The head of the Supreme Court, another tribunal hijacked by Law and Justice, has accused him of “Stalinist methods.” And some supporters of the new government accuse him of being too timid in removing improperly appointed judges.
“We need to cut off all the heads of this dragon at once,” Professor Krystian Markiewicz, the president of Iustitia, an association of judges, said recently.
Of Poland’s 9,000 or so judges, around a third got their positions under a nomination process introduced by Law and Justice that gave politicians a big say.
Only about 100 of the judges selected through Law and Justice’s system have so far been replaced. Parliament passed legislation in April to remove politicians from the selection process, but Mr. Duda, the president, sent the law to the Constitutional Tribunal for review.
“We must be patient, but at the same time determined to make things happen,” Mr. Bodnar said.
Other ministers chose a more radical path. When Mr. Duda blocked efforts to overhaul the state broadcasting system, the culture minister responded by dissolving the legal entities under which state television and radio stations operated.
The maneuver, which skirted and, some believe, violated the law, worked, but it prompted howls of protest from Law and Justice.
The government, Mr. Bodnar said, has been “trapped by different — either institutional or personal — obstacles to bringing the system back to order.”
He said he was making progress but added: “If you have a system that was continuously destroyed day by day for eight years, you cannot rebuild it within one year.”
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