What makes this election victory so shocking is that Poland is supposed to be the poster-boy of the new post-communist Member States. But with the election of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland the specter of populist governments winning elections in Eastern Europe has become much more serious. Hungary’s President, Victor Orban, with his brand of xenophobic “illiberal democracy” is a pariah who used to be confined to the European fringes. Poland’s political parties are particularly indicative of elite capture, and exhibit deeper symptoms of political decay (Kopecký, 1995). Poland shows evidence of this through elite state capture, where public power is used primarily for private gain rather than public welfare (Innes, 2014).
One reason they persist is that winners have an incentive to maintain the status quo.
Since that period, the new elite sought to fortify their position, through both informal and formal mechanisms, eventually leading to rigidity vulnerable to what Samuel Huntington calls “political decay:” a political class out of touch with regular citizens becomes vulnerable to a populist assault.Political decay occurs when socioeconomic political institutions grow unable to accommodate new social groups (Huntington, 1968).Institutions become path dependent, meaning that they can persist despite changes in society (Hay & Wincott, 1998). A historical institutionalist hypothesis is that Poland’s institutional development was shaped by the contingent events during the transition from communism. Eighty billion euros have been allocated in cohesion funds for 2014-20 (Economist, 2014).How did a country that benefited so much from the European Union’s largess and membership within the Union come to elect a Eurosceptic populist party?This essay argues that the answer lies in the particular features of Poland’s institutional arrangements that arose out of the post-communist transition period. Poland has also been the biggest recipient of EU development funds. Donald Tusk, its former president, now serves as president of the European Council. How did things go so wrong? Poland was once the shining example of the EU’s eastward expansion.
In response to the PiS’s policies, the European Commission took the extreme step of triggering Article 7, which could result in suspension of Poland’s voting rights, among other sanctions(Baume, 2017). The Polish populist Law and Justice Party (PiS) overturned the mainstream consensus in Polish politics by returning to power in 2015 with a populist platform, decrying a selfish elite and advancing policies that critics saw as illiberal and authoritarian.
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