Forgetting what democracy is for

Observer

08-07-2025

On June 2, I got a sense of history coming full circle in the Polish town of Sopot, on the Baltic Sea just a few miles from the Gdańsk Shipyard. Sharing a stage at the Plenary Session of the European Financial Congress with Lech Wałęsa, the legendary trade unionist who led the 1980 Solidarity strike at the Lenin Shipyard (as the Gdańsk Shipyard was then known) and later became Poland's first post-communist president, I felt I was witnessing the end of an era.
To be sure, Wałęsa is sprightly at age 81. His spirit seemed subdued, and the Polish bankers, financiers and business elites who filled the room seemed downright stunned. Just hours before, the country had learned that the far-right populist Karol Nawrocki — a historian, former boxer and political outsider – had won Poland's presidential election, narrowly defeating Warsaw's cosmopolitan, progressive mayor, Rafał Trzaskowski of Civic Platform.
Wałęsa had posted a stark message on social media that morning: 'Goodbye Poland.' But since then, the outcome has been contested, with Poland's controversial Supreme Court reviewing a flood of complaints about uncounted votes, mostly for Trzaskowski. Although it was my first trip to Poland, the situation felt eerily familiar. Like post-Brexit Britain and the US over the past decade of Donald Trump's political dominance, here was a country split down the middle.
Frustratingly for liberals, the allegations levelled against Nawrocki appear to have confirmed his 'authenticity' and bolstered his support among some segments of the electorate. The fight for the presidency was but one front in a broader political struggle that emanates from the Solidarity movement itself. At the centre of the confrontation are two titans of Polish politics: Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the right-wing populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk, the head of Civic Platform and a former president of the European Council.
Kaczyński casts himself as a defender of the workers and trade unionists who have been 'betrayed' by liberal reforms, globalisation and the EU. Tusk, his longtime rival, has emerged as the face of a pro-European, democratically committed Poland. The feud is as much personal as it is political. Kaczyński once worked under Wałęsa, before turning against him, and Wałęsa endorsed Tusk's successful 2023 prime ministerial bid. Moreover, Kaczyński blames Tusk – with no evidence – for the plane crash that killed his twin brother, then-president Lech Kaczyński, in 2010.
Poles will proudly tell you that it was Solidarity, not the fall of the Berlin Wall, that really lifted the Iron Curtain. How, then, did a country once so united by Wałęsa's Solidarity movement become so polarised and splintered?
His triumph – ultimately against the Communist regime itself, in 1989 – demonstrated not just the power of the common man, but the strength of coalition-building. He had brought together workers, intellectuals, religious conservatives and liberals. At its peak, Solidarity boasted ten million members – one-third of the working-age population – vividly illustrating the power of grassroots mobilisation and civic participation. It gained widespread legitimacy because it was deeply democratic, rather than bureaucratic.
In an era of cherry-picked histories, there are many competing explanations for why the Solidarity consensus fragmented. Kaczyński and his ilk blame Wałęsa's personality. Depicting the former president as autocratic, narcissistic, or irrelevant, they accuse him of squandering Polish freedom by cutting secret deals with the old regime. Others see the right-wing nostalgia for 'sovereignty' and identity as the 'post-traumatic' disorder of a scarred nation that has been repeatedly bullied into statelessness by outsiders. And still others treat the alliances that Solidarity established as an anomaly – a fleeting moment of unity in the face of a common enemy.
But perhaps the real problem lies elsewhere. Whether it was influenced by the 'neoliberal moment' of the 1980s or the practical need to curry favour with Western powers, the Solidarity movement did pivot abruptly to the economic orthodoxy of 'shock therapy.' As a result, 'the Polish revolution' became more about private property than popular participation.
True, Poland's post-communist economic record has been remarkable. With 30 years of uninterrupted growth, it was the only EU country to avoid recession in 2008-09. But the full social costs of this economic transformation have been underappreciated. After the so-called Balcerowicz Plan – named for the Polish economist and early democratic-era finance minister, Leszek Balcerowicz – had ushered in radical free-market reforms, inequality soared alongside growth. While privatisation and deregulation lifted GDP, the same processes also fractured the body politic.
On July 1, after allegedly reviewing allegations of voting irregularities, the Polish Supreme Court upheld the election result, clearing the path for Nawrocki's scheduled inauguration in August, even as the fate of Poland's Third Republic hangs in the balance. Wałęsa helped usher in Poland's democratic era, but as he recently conceded: 'We did one thing wrong. We forgot about the people.'
Poland today is not just a bellwether. It is a battleground – between the legacies of communism and capitalism, between liberal democracy and populist nationalism, and between memory and manipulation. What is at stake is not only Poland's soul, but the European project and democracy itself. Wałęsa – a figure both exalted and embattled – reminds us that history is often cyclical, and that the revolution must never forget whom it is for.
Antara Haldar
The writer is Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge and a visiting faculty at Harvard University