So How Do We Save Democracy?
Photo by The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
A little more than a year ago, in the fall of 2023, Poland held parliamentary elections. Activists and civil society leaders described them as the most important since 1989, Poland’s first vote after the end of communism, because they saw this as the country’s last chance to save its democracy.
The right-wing Law and Justice Party (PiS) had been in power for eight years, and in that time, had undermined institutional safeguards and the rule of the law, remaking the judiciary and constitutional courts while consolidating control over the media. These elections were free, but not exactly fair – the government had every advantage, but the electoral process still functioned. However, many felt if PiS returned to power, that advantage would become insurmountable. There might not be a next time.
A few days before Poland voted, I spoke to Marta Lempart, the leader of Strajk Kobiet, or Women’s Strike, a pro-abortion group, in her office in Warsaw. In 2020, PiS passed a near-total ban on abortion, and Lempart and her allies led popular protests against it, helping to reshape public opinion in the largely Catholic country. Lempart’s Women Strike was one pillar in the big-tent opposition challenging PiS, but she was frustrated with some of the messaging. Voters, especially young people, were deeply disillusioned with the political establishment. Lempart said rather than addressing those concerns, politicians offered them an ultimatum instead: save democracy, or else.
“We’re saying ‘it’s absolutely okay if you don’t feel anything, when you see the flag, when you hear the anthem, if you don’t care what happens, [if] the call to save the country just doesn’t appeal to you,” Lempart told me last October of how she was speaking to voters. But the reality was that they needed 50 percent plus one in parliament to change the abortion laws. “If you go and vote for abortion, believe that then we can deliver,” she said, of her message.
The centrist coalition did come to power in Poland, an alliance of leftist and centrist parties that together denied PiS its majority. Maybe the pro-democracy messaging worked, or maybe, like everywhere else in the world this past year, people were furious with the status quo: inflation was high, a war was raging across the border. Maybe people wanted change, and the option on offer was also the one that vowed to restore Polish democracy.
Lempart’s comments stuck with me because it felt prescient, a warning of sorts. So many elections in recent years have been fought on this idea of protecting or restoring democracy – one candidate or party were the normies, the others were authoritarians-in-waiting, and this election might be the last chance to kick them out, or to keep them from power. This was true in 2020 in the United States, in 2022, in places like France and Brazil, in 2023, in places like Turkey, and Thailand, and yes, in Poland, as well as in 2024, when about half the world voted, in India, Senegal, in France again, in some German states, and of course, in the United States.
Democracy didn’t always win, but in the places it did, it usually succeeded by cobbling together some version of a democratic front from across the political spectrum. Joe Biden’s anti-MAGA coalition in 2020, and the one that showed up in 2022 midterms, were versions of this: from Never Trump Republicans to progressive activists, united at least for the moment. In Brazil, in 2022, leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) picked a conservative and former political rival as his running mate in an effort to build a broad consensus against Jair Bolsonaro and he narrowly succeeded. In French parliamentary elections this summer, despite some wishy-washiness from Emmanuel Macron, left-wingers and centrists declined to challenge each other in the final round of voting, and urged the French public to vote tactically against the far-right. It created a fractured mess, but it pushed Marine Le Pen’s National Rally to third.
These “democratic fronts” exist in opposition to the illiberal forces, and the voters who join them do so with an understanding that they may have to compromise some of their ideological beliefs or material needs to protect shared values, the rule of law, and the institutions that are otherwise under attack. It doesn’t even have to be that lofty: maybe it’s just the lesser of two evils, if one of the evils is a tiny bit more fascist than the other.
But a time limit is implicit in that contract. This is an ad hoc marriage, not a permanent one. We’ve just got to beat these guys. Once we do, we can go back to normal politics, argue about taxes and guns and entitlements, but at least exist in the same ballpark when it comes to the facts and some unspecified boundaries of acceptability. This “return to normalcy” was the promise of 2020 Joe Biden, after a pandemic and four years of Trump chaos.