Over multiple campaigns, the two leading forces in Polish politics have repeatedly described elections as “the most important” in the country’s post-1989 history. Political leaders have claimed that the very survival of Poland’s democracy has hung in the balance, with victory for their rivals potentially signifying its end. Both Jarosław Kaczyński’s national populist Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość—PiS) and Donald Tusk’s liberal Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska—PO) have employed this Manichaean political rhetoric, using divergent arguments when in power and opposition. In government, both have claimed mandates to re-democratize institutions previously damaged or degraded by their rivals; in opposition, they have protested against overreaching executive actions understood as forms of de-democratization. These discourses of re-democratization and de-democratization have developed partly in a mirrored dialogue, with the parties exchanging narratives together with power in the period from PiS’s electoral triumph in 2015 to its defeat by Tusk’s expanded Civic Coalition (Koalicja Obywatelska—KO) and associated allies in 2023. The central discursive contest of Poland’s party politics has become a struggle not just over concrete policy positions, but over the nature, health, and future of Polish democracy.
This paper explores the evolution of de- and re-democratization narratives in Poland from PiS’s rise to power in 2015 to the early phase of the current Tusk government from 2023 to 2025. It pays attention to significant differences in lexicon and in points of emphasis between the narratives of KO and PiS—and does not assume symmetry between them. Yet it also notes that the two sides have borrowed or adapted aspects of each other’s rhetoric, with PiS—in opposition after 2023—moving to echo many of KO’s claims with respect to rule of law and institutional colonization, and KO turning a critique of oligarchization against PiS in response to nepotistic practices of state capture.
Finally, the paper examines the demand side of politics, analyzing how these narratives have resonated in different sections of a polarized electorate, often intensified—and partly shaped—by party-adjacent civil society. The primary evidence for analysis is survey measures of satisfaction with democracy among supporters of different parties and various sociocultural or socioeconomic groups. The mirrored but distinct narratives of political actors reflect—albeit to a limited extent—divergent understandings of democracy in different sections of the electorate: specifically, democracy understood as a set of restraints on power or the protection of individual and minority rights versus democracy understood as representation of popular will and the responsibilities of the state to its citizens. In this sense, subsequent elections have been—and may continue to be—contests over the very form and meaning of Poland’s democracy.
