This article examines the challenges facing governments aiming to restore liberal democratic institutions after illiberal rule. It uses the case study of Poland under Donald Tusk’s current g

This article examines the challenges facing governments aiming to restore liberal democratic institutions after illiberal rule. It uses the case study of Poland under Donald Tusk’s current government — which defeated populist Law and Justice (PiS) in 2023 — to construct a wider conceptual framework for understanding dilemmas of post-illiberal reform that may also confront other democracies. A key legacy of democratic backsliding is a series of institutional traps that are difficult to counteract without resorting to the same decisionist methods that made them. Proceduralist approaches risk leaving the damage unrepaired and demobilizing supporters, while more decisive action may require capitulation to the illiberal playbook.

In October 2023, Poland’s populist Law and Justice (PiS) party lost power after two terms in government to a “prodemocratic” opposition alliance led by former prime minister and, more recently, European Council president Donald Tusk. In a triumph of democratic mobilization against PiS’s illiberal rule, the alliance won a decisive majority in both chambers of parliament. The outcome was trumpeted as Poland’s “return to Europe” and the “restoration” of liberal democracy after eight years of democratic backsliding. Tusk again became prime minister, and his government pledged to repair Poland’s degraded institutions, rehabilitate the rule of law, and hold PiS to account for its actions. The European Commission released long-blocked funds based on the new government’s “action plan” to reestablish the constitutional order,¹ and “in recognition of his unwavering commitment to restoring democracy,” Tusk received the 2024 Chatham House Prize.² Liberals celebrated the Polish example as a signal case of democracy fighting back against an illiberal threat, with lessons for other European countries facing a resurgence of radical-right populism.

The first year of the Tusk government soon tempered such triumphalism. Disagreements within the diverse ruling coalition, together with the veto power of PiS-aligned president Andrzej Duda (2015–present), prevented progress on key election promises, including the liberalization of abortion laws. The new government’s migration policy reinforced PiS’s hard line on border control, and its efforts to depoliticize the judiciary and state institutions either failed to reverse PiS capture or managed to do so only by resorting to measures resembling the former ruling party’s “decisionist” methods — that is, methods that are legal only by virtue of being deemed so by the ruling power. To justify such tactics, Tusk invoked the concept of “militant democracy,” which prioritizes efficacy over a strict commitment to democratic procedure and the rule of law. The prime minister claimed that to stamp out PiS’s lasting influence on captured institutions, it might be necessary to bend the rules. Now in opposition, PiS has accused Tusk and his allies of becoming the real threats to Polish democracy.

The crucial presidential elections of May–June 2025 have revealed the extent of public dissatisfaction with the new government. Tusk’s candidate, Rafa³ Trzaskowski, lost a runoff to PiS’s radical-right newcomer Karol Nawrocki — 49.1 percent to 50.9 percent — after an acrimonious campaign. Barely six months earlier, Trzaskowski had been a strong favorite; even in early May he led by 7–8 percentage points in polls. The first-round vote on May 18 set the scene for his defeat, as Tusk’s coalition and other left-liberal candidates performed far below their parties’ combined parliamentary results of 53.7 percent, winning only 44.9 percent of the vote. Antiestablishment, far-right candidates took an unprecedented 21 percent of the vote, much of which then went to Nawrocki in the June 1 runoff. These results exposed growing disaffection with the government’s record, as it failed to mobilize left-liberal voters on the same scale as in 2023, while the electorate as a whole swung substantially to the right. Trzaskowski’s defeat amounted to a kind of “midterm” verdict in a virtual referendum on an increasingly unpopular government.

The case of Poland after eight years of PiS rule illustrates the challenges, dilemmas, and paradoxes of liberalism after illiberalism. In redressing PiS’s transgressions, the new government faced a “post-illiberal trilemma”: In principle, Tusk’s government was committed to delivering quick, effective, and unimpeachably legal solutions to illiberalism. In practice however, it could often fulfill at best only two of these three conditions at once. For the most part, the coalition has either taken no action at all or produced rapid, makeshift solutions at the bounds of legal probity. A key legacy of illiberalism turns out to be a series of institutional traps that are difficult to counteract in the short term without resorting to the same methods that established them in the first place. Inaction leaves the damage unrepaired and demobilizes supporters, while effective action may involve capitulation to the illiberal playbook. In both cases, the restoration of liberal democracy remains mostly declarative, suggesting — along with the presidential election results — that Poland’s illiberal moment is far from over.

Tusk’s Prodemocratic Coalition Prevails

When PiS took power in 2015, it was almost immediately perceived — both in Poland and internationally — as a fundamental threat to democracy. As the party moved to take over the country’s Constitutional Tribunal by installing its own political appointees with the help of President Duda, PiS appeared to be part of a dangerous global wave of right-wing, illiberal populism, or even authoritarianism. Over the following eight years, the PiS government was accused of undermining the rule of law, eroding the division of powers, weakening checks on the executive, and colonizing the state as it purged and stacked with loyalists a host of key institutions, including the judiciary, prosecution service, civil service, and public media.³ These actions brought the party into a state of permanent conflict with international partners and institutions. Beginning in 2016, leading democracy indexes such as V-Dem and Freedom House documented sharp declines in the quality of Polish democracy. And in 2017, the European Union took the unprecedented action of activating Article 7 of the EU Treaty (which allows for suspension of EU membership rights) against Poland for breaching the rule of law.

Inside Poland, the criticism was just as fierce: The main opposition parties, large parts of the mainstream commercial media, and civil society groups all attacked PiS for undermining democracy. In November 2015, a new civic movement called the Committee for the Defense of Democracy (KOD) formed and began leading a series of mass protests in early December, barely a month into PiS’s rule, over judicial appointments that were in violation of a Constitutional Tribunal ruling. Although the KOD was formally independent of political parties, opposition politicians often appeared in the crowds and spoke at marches, harnessing the protests to build their own political narratives of resistance to PiS. By late 2016, politicians, mainstream media, and the KOD were working together, as renewed protests erupted over PiS-imposed restrictions on media coverage in the parliament. Opposition MPs occupied the parliament building, media outlets boycotted reporting on the parliament, and protesters took to the streets.

Opposition parties, in dialogue with activists and supportive media, built a central narrative of a fundamental clash between an antidemocratic, authoritarian PiS and a prodemocratic opposition supported by civil society. PiS, for its part, cast the opposition parties as anti-Polish and beholden to crooked elite and foreign-interest groups, while portraying itself as the only defender of the interests of ordinary Poles through its right-left combination of conservative cultural politics and redistributive social programs. According to this rhetoric, the liberal opposition was the real threat to democracy because it ignored the concerns of the majority of citizens. In this polarized climate, both sides presented elections as a Manichean struggle for the future — perhaps the very existence — of Polish democracy.

In the 2019 parliamentary elections, the opposition’s grand defense of democracy failed: PiS not only won another term in government but significantly expanded its vote share from 38 percent to 44 percent. A large plurality of Polish voters clearly perceived no serious threat to Polish democracy, and were instead convinced by PiS’s record of delivering on many key promises — above all, on social-spending initiatives that materially improved the lives of many Poles and reduced inequality. Among such initiatives was the party’s flagship Family 500+ program, still in operation today, which initially provided families with a monthly allowance of 500 Polish z³oty (about US$125) for each child after the first, before being extended to all children. PiS was aided in its success by favorable macroeconomic conditions that helped to sustain the party’s spending programs and created a climate of economic optimism and a sense of well-being among Poles. At the same time, the opposition was divided among various quarreling parties and often appeared poorly led and devoid of constructive new ideas. That would change in 2023, when a grand coalition of parties styling themselves as the prodemocratic opposition stormed to victory with historically high turnout.

The PiS government faced successive crises beginning in 2020 with the covid-19 pandemic, which put an end to the positive economic climate. Then came Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the accompanying economic downturn amid an energy crisis and rampant inflation. The party also suffered from its ideological overreach: A decision of the PiS-captured Constitutional Tribunal to narrow Poland’s already restrictive abortion laws brought hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets during the pandemic lockdown in late 2020. Meanwhile, Donald Tusk’s return to domestic politics in 2022 gave the opposition a more dynamic, savvy leader. In the 2023 election campaign, Tusk’s Civic Coalition (KO) — the largest opposition grouping — would work more cooperatively than in the past with the other opposition parties, promising a new coalition government to restore Polish democracy.

The opposition parties began to formally cooperate in 2019 ahead of European Parliament elections in the short-lived European Coalition and later that year for the Polish parliamentary elections in a “Senate pact” that wrested control of the upper house away from PiS. In civil society, meanwhile, a group of radical anti-PiS activists coalesced around the social-media hashtag #SilniRazem (#StrongTogether) to demand that opposition parties work together in defense of democracy. This loose civic movement presented another opportunity for the opposition to unite, with KO even appropriating the #SilniRazem slogan. Bolstered, and partly pressured, by this civic activism as well as wider social expectations of opposition cooperation in defense of democracy, the anti-PiS alliance thus crystallized, with parties representing a wide range of views on various issues united around the central aim of restoring Poland’s legal order and democratic norms.