In late January 1993, three years after the abolition of the Soviet-imposed Polish People’s Republic, a crowd of 5,000 demonstrators marched on the Warsaw residence of Lech Wałęsa. As the chairman of Solidarity, the independent trade union and mass opposition movement that negotiated communist Poland’s demise, Wałęsa is widely credited with initiating the chain of events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and a peaceful resolution to the cold war. But after he became post-communist Poland’s first democratically elected president, his critics circulated rumours that he had been a communist collaborator all along. Chanting “We want a president, not an agent,” the demonstrators burnt the Nobel peace prizewinner in effigy.

Their leaders included a former Solidarity functionary called Jarosław Kaczyński. Armed with a megaphone, he angrily denounced his former leader: “He was supposed to be our president, but he turned out to be their president, the president of the reds!”

Short, white-haired, and always dressed in black and white, Kaczyński is now the most powerful man in Poland. In 2015, the party he founded with his identical twin brother Lech, Law and Justice, won the first parliamentary majority for a single party since the democratic transition; since then, it stands accused of attempting to reverse that transition by seizing control of Poland’s independent democratic institutions. Although Kaczyński holds no office other than his seat in parliament and the chairmanship of his party, President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Beata Szydło are entirely beholden to his patronage. Law and Justice’s eminence grise – part Yoda, part Karl Lagerfeld – runs a country of almost 40 million people from his party office in central Warsaw.

At the time of Poland’s liberation more than a quarter of a century ago, the Kaczyński twins were middle-ranking members of the Solidarity leadership. They participated in the 1989 round-table talks between Solidarity and the communists, which paved the way for the elections that led to the collapse of communism. However, they built their careers on the argument that Wałęsa and the liberal intellectuals at the top of Solidarity betrayed Poland’s transition to democracy by allowing communists to keep their hands on the levers of power in exchange for the status of high office. Known for having starred as child actors in the communist-era film The Two Who Stole the Moon, theirs was a symbiotic political dynamic, with the more softly spoken and personable Lech softening the image of the vitriolic and misanthropic Jarosław. But their partnership was cut short by Lech’s death in a plane crash in 2010. Fuelled by a cocktail of grief and revenge, the controversy surrounding his brother’s death gave new impetus to Jarosław’s mission to “remodel” Polish democracy.

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With a penchant for conspiracy and a vituperative speaking style, Jarosław Kaczyński routinely brands his opponents “gangsters”, “cronies”, and “reds”. Before the parliamentary elections in October 2015, he claimed that migrants from the Middle East were bringing cholera and dysentery to Europe, risking the spread of “various parasites and protozoa”. More recently, he implied that people demonstrating against the Law and Justice government were “the worst sort of Poles” – an epithet they have adopted as a badge of honour.

Since taking office in November, Law and Justice has focused its attention on the pillars of Poland’s democracy. Parliament has taken direct control of state media, on the basis that “public media are ignoring their mission towards the nation”. It has also taken direct control of the appointments of senior civil servants. The head of the prime minister’s office has described the removal of state officials as a means to “eliminate the social pathology” that existed under the previous government headed by Law and Justice’s main rivals – adding that “it will be possible to immediately fire any person for whom the fact or even the suspicion of them having been involved in this pathology is confirmed.”

In December, Law and Justice passed a law designed to paralyse the constitutional tribunal – the country’s highest judicial body, which rules on the legality of government actions – by requiring the court to consider its backlog in chronological order, thereby obstructing any judgment of the present government’s decisions.

Commonly labelled conservative or nationalist, Law and Justice blends the religious and patriotic rituals of Poland’s long history of resistance to foreign oppression with hostility to free-market capitalism and a heavy dose of conspiracy regarding the machinations of Poland’s enemies. It is the vanguard of a movement that goes far beyond the party itself, supported by sympathetic smaller parties, ultra-Catholic media, nationalist youth organisations and an assortment of cranks and cynics who share a hostility to liberalism in all its guises. As foreign minister Witold Waszczykowski told the German tabloid Bild, his government “only wants to cure our country of a few illnesses”, such as: “a new mixture of cultures and races, a world made up of cyclists and vegetarians, who only use renewable energy and who battle all signs of religion … What moves most Poles [is] tradition, historical awareness, love of country, faith in God and normal family life between a woman and a man.”

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Many find the Law and Justice phenomenon utterly bemusing. Although still a relatively poor nation by western European standards, by any objective measure Poland’s recent history is one of triumph. It has the most successful and dynamic economy of any former communist country. After centuries of occupation and partition, Poland is now an independent state anchored in western political, economic and security institutions such as the EU and Nato. Poles have never been as prosperous and secure in more than 1,000 years of existence, and they now enjoy individual and collective rights their ancestors could only dream of.

And yet a significant minority of Poles believe that Poland and Polishness remain subject to foreign control and malign internal forces. It is a belief rooted in Poland’s traumatic past and the chaos and controversies of its post-communist transition – encouraged by Jarosław Kaczyński’s consistent assertions that this transition was, in fact, a sham. Poland’s present turmoil is the story of how anger at Poland’s liberals mutated into a war on liberal democracy itself.

Although the country’s recent illiberal turn is commonly described as the latest component in a wider illiberal wave in central European politics, it has much deeper roots – which go back to the civil war that broke out among Solidarity’s leaders in what should have been their finest hour. Surveying the wreckage of Solidarity’s collapse, the Irish journalist Jacqueline Hayden noted in 1994 that “Abuse and vilification are regarded by some as the norm in the world of politics, but when the poisoned cup is passed from associates who were until very recently marching under the same anti-communist banner, the result is a phenomenal purification of the political atmosphere.”

Many find the Law and Justice phenomenon utterly bemusing. By any measure Poland’s recent history is one of triumph

It was a war that was as much personal as it was political, with enmities that had been stewing for a decade erupting as the lid of communist rule was lifted. In the 1980s, Solidarity had 10 million members across a series of autonomous regional chapters, which were often more radical and less amenable to compromise than Wałęsa and the liberal intellectuals on his advisory committee, who pursued a strategy of constructive engagement with the communist authorities.

Today, many Law and Justice supporters refuse to acknowledge that the anti-communist struggle is over. In 2015, a publisher sympathetic to Law and Justice brought out a photographic history of the Solidarity movement with the subtitle Years of Struggle, 1980-2015. It begins with a picture of Lech Wałęsa signing Solidarity into existence in September 1980 and ends with a picture of Andrzej Duda, Poland’s smirking Law and Justice president; its opening montage intermingles black and white images of Solidarity demonstrations in the 1980s with colour photos of contemporary protests against Law and Justice’s political opponents. Understanding Law and Justice’s claim to represent the “true” heirs to Solidarity, and their assertion that their opponents represent those who betrayed the revolution, is the key to making sense of the convulsions that threaten further to destabilise Europe in its hour of crisis.

* * *

Poland’s democratic transition was negotiated, incremental, and compromised. After Solidarity won massive electoral support in partially free elections held in June 1989, Poland’s last communist president, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, was forced to appoint a Solidarity leader as prime minister – an arrangement known as “your president, our prime minister”. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, one of Lech Wałęsa’s leading advisers, became prime minister, but the communist party retained ultimate control, with Jaruzelski remaining as president and communist generals running the key “power ministries” of interior and defence.

Mazowiecki’s administration, drawn from a tight-knit circle of liberal intellectuals, engineered the key aspects of the transition, securing approval for a radical plan to institute a free-market economy, and overseeing the removal of the reference in the constitution to the Communist party’s “leading role”. The Polish People’s Republic was abolished on 31 December 1989, the Communist party was dissolved a month later, and Jaruzelski, the architect of the imposition of martial law in 1981, finally left the scene in December 1990.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lech Wałęsa with President George Bush in July 1989, shortly after Solidarity won massive electoral support in partially free elections. Photograph: Dennis Cook/AP

Despite these achievements, the arrangement was a recipe for public disillusionment. The pain inflicted by the economic reforms was frontloaded, with widespread job losses. Although on a much lesser scale than in Ukraine or Russia, party insiders were able to take advantage of the privatisation process to buy up state assets – and the liberal intellectuals newly installed in high office were seen as accessories to their corruption. For those who believed that overthrowing communism would bring immediate prosperity and right the wrongs of the past, the fact that they were still poor while communist officials profited from the transition made it seem like the old order had not really been overthrown.

The resulting anger was shared by those middle-ranking elements of the Solidarity leadership, including Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński, not included in the new arrangement. Having led the sub-group on trade union law during the round-table talks Lech was respected, but middling in status. Jarosław had a lower profile than his twin (unlike Lech and thousands of others, he was not interned during the imposition of martial law in 1981), but he would make his name when the tensions in the leadership led to a split known as Solidarity’s “war at the top”.

In May 1990, Jarosław broke from the Solidarity parliamentary caucus to establish his own party, Centre Agreement. He joined forces with the radical elements within Solidarity, who had long resented the conciliatory approach of Wałęsa’s liberal advisers, and fanned the flames of public fury at the iniquities of the transition. This anger was directed against his former allies, whom he accused of participating in a “hybrid Jaruzelski-Mazowiecki power system” – working alongside the hated communist leaders and against the interests of the people.

Jarosław’s point was not simply that the liberals were working too closely with the communist nomenklatura – they had joined it. “Jaruzelski-Mazowiecki” was a “power system” – their president, their prime minister. A line had been drawn, with the communists and the liberals on one side, and everybody else on the other. The conclusions that people should draw were radical, and toxic: the liberals were traitors, and since the real revolution had not yet happened, it was still to come.

The Kaczyńskis found an ally in Lech Wałęsa, still Solidarity’s chairman, who had demurred from the premiership in 1989 because he had his eyes on the presidency. Many of Wałęsa’s top advisers were now in government, but he was still answerable to the thousands of angry Solidarity members who were losing their jobs during the transition to capitalism and democracy. This gave him an obvious interest in shifting blame to the liberal intellectuals running the Mazowiecki government, while demanding that he should replace Jaruzelski as president and take command of the transition process.

At the end of 1990, Wałęsa stood against Mazowiecki for the presidency. This showdown between Solidarity’s charismatic, proletarian leader and his urbane former adviser symbolised the breakdown of the alliances within Polish society that had made Solidarity possible. Jarosław Kaczyński ran Wałęsa’s winning campaign and was rewarded with a position as the head of the presidential chancellery. Jarosław’s argument that his former allies had betrayed the revolution had propelled him from relative obscurity to the Presidential Palace in less than a year.

Once in office, President Wałęsa had little use for Jarosław’s brand of guerrilla politics, throwing him out after 11 months because he needed people who could “do a job, not just wage a war”. Jarosław responded by deploying the same argument against Wałęsa that he had used against the liberals, accusing Wałęsa of being a communist agent dedicated to obstructing a revolution that Wałęsa himself had done perhaps more than anybody else to bring about. Jarosław’s allies in government hinted that they had access to files that would prove Wałęsa and the liberal intellectuals around Mazowiecki were communist collaborators. A parliamentary commission eventually ruled that the threat of these “dishonestly drawn up lists” had been used by one of Jarosław’s allies, the interior minister Antoni Macierewicz, to hold on to power illegally. Jarosław and his supporters argued that the commission’s ruling was simply more proof that communists retained control of the Polish state. (Macierewicz is now serving as minister of national defence).

The infighting among the erstwhile Solidarity allies brought Poland’s former communists back into power: the Democratic Left Alliance, the successor to the Polish United Workers’ party that had ruled the country until 1989, won parliamentary elections and the presidency in 1993 and 1995. The post-communists and the liberals negotiated a new constitution, which enshrined the rights of non-believers in law and denied the Catholic church legal primacy in public life – enraging fundamentalist Catholics and those who believed in the liberal-communist conspiracy.

When the new constitution was put to a national referendum, many regions where the influence of the Catholic church is strongest, particularly in the east, voted against it. The constitutional process gave the conspiracy of a secret liberal-communist alliance a philosophical basis: there is no difference between liberal secularism and communist atheism, because both are used to persecute the church; there is no difference between liberal democracy and communist authoritarianism because both are used to impose a godless minority’s will on “ordinary Poles”.

The result of the constitutional process was that the various post-Solidarity factions were broadly divided into two camps: those that considered the new constitutional order to be legitimate, and those who argued that it was not. This division led to the establishment in 2001 of two rival post-Solidarity parties: Civic Platform and Law and Justice.

Civic Platform, led for most of its existence by Donald Tusk before he became president of the European Council, included many of the liberal architects of the post-1989 republic and their supporters – those who had negotiated the transition, those who determined its free-market economic model, those who established a conciliatory tone and pro-European orientation in foreign policy, those who negotiated the constitutional settlement reached in 1997. Sharing political ownership of the constitutional order, they trumpeted the achievements of the “New Poland”.

Law and Justice, by contrast, acted as a vehicle for the dissatisfied: a coalition of those hostile to the economic, cultural and constitutional pillars of Poland’s “liberal democracy” and the “leftists” (an umbrella term for communists and liberals) who defended them. As the personality most closely associated with the poisonous nature of Solidarity’s “war at the top”, Jarosław’s reputation was partially rehabilitated by his more mild-mannered twin brother Lech, who served briefly as a popular justice minister between 2000 and 2001 and then became mayor of Warsaw.

The Kaczyńskis argued that a communist-liberal układ (meaning “deal” or “pact”) had given rise to “a system of interests that emerged from the former communist regime, which joined together with some people from the Solidarity camp”, whereby state officials with communist sympathies operate in conjunction with financial institutions, media companies and intelligence services to rig the economy and subvert Polish democracy. It was essentially the same argument as Jarosław had made in 1990: their rivals, the Democratic Left Alliance and Civic Platform, were fronts for the corrupt “power-system” that had denied Poles their revolution.

When Law and Justice came first in parliamentary elections in 2005, Jarosław had the right to take the post of prime minister but, in deference to his own negative reputation, he chose to nominate a proxy in his place. A month later, Lech Kaczyński defeated Tusk in presidential elections. Soon Jarosław disposed of his proxy and became prime minister himself, in coalition with the agrarian-populist Self Defence party and the nationalist-religious League of Polish Families, implementing a zealous programme of “decommunisation”. The minister of justice hunted for agents of the “system” in state bodies, a proposed decommunisation law demanded signed affidavits from members of various professions to prove that they had not collaborated with the communists before 1989, and the military intelligence service, assumed to be a nest of communist spies, was disbanded.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński in 2005. Photograph: Ludmiła Mitręga/AFP/Getty Images

Jarosław acted on the justification that, whereas he was fulfilling his role as successor to the heroes of the anti-communist struggle, his political rivals, including Civic Platform, represented the communists themselves, telling a rally of supporters held at the former Lenin Shipyard, where Solidarity began and where protesting workers had been shot by communist paramilitaries in 1970, that “We are standing where we have always stood, they are standing where [the paramilitaries] stood.”

But his coalition fell apart in 2007, with Civic Platform winning the subsequent election and Donald Tusk replacing Jarosław as prime minister. Lech Kaczyński remained as president, dedicating himself to frustrating the Civic Platform-led government. Blamed for his spoiling role and a series of unseemly spats with the government, his support collapsed, and by the beginning of 2010 his chances of re-election at the end of the year were widely assumed to be non-existent. Poland never got the chance to find out.

* * *

On 10 April 2010, President Lech Kaczyński was flying with a delegation to the Katyn forest near Smolensk in western Russia to commemorate one of the darkest moments in Polish history, the murder of over 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet secret police in April 1940. The pilots of his plane were befuddled by thick fog as they attempted to land, and crashed into a forest adjoining Smolensk’s airfield. All 96 passengers were killed, including the president, his wife, the chief of the general staff, the heads of all three armed services, the director of the intelligence service, the president of the National Bank of Poland, and the children and grandchildren of officers murdered nearby 70 years before.

Poles are conscientious mourners. On All Saints Day, 1 November, millions go to cemeteries to place flowers and candles on the graves of their loved ones. As the late autumn sun sets, the sky goes dark, but the ground is illuminated and the light from each candle merges into a golden haze across the hillside – one’s own sense of loss joining with a collective sense of national remembrance. The personal, national and celestial become intertwined: Poland’s partition, restoration, and liberation as crucifixion, resurrection and ascension; loved ones and national heroes as saints.

By the afternoon of the day of the Smolensk catastrophe, the candles that were usually found in cemeteries on the margins of town had appeared en masse in public spaces in the heart of Warsaw. The politics of grief – never far from the surface – reasserted itself at the centre of Poland’s public life.

Some spoke of the disaster in the language of messianism, the idea that God sanctioned Poland’s suffering for a holy purpose. For 19th-century poets such as Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, lamenting the final partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, themes of loss were mixed with the mysticism of romanticism, Catholicism and suffering to produce an allegorical vocabulary of sacrifice and resistance, as in this verse by Kazimierz Brodziński:

Hail O Christ, Thou Lord of Men!

Poland in Thy footsteps treading

Like Thee suffers, at Thy bidding;

Like Thee, too, shall rise again

In the messianist mindset, history is not linear, but circular. Because it is Poland’s destiny to suffer, Polish history is not “one damned thing after another” but the same damned thing, happening over and over again. In the aftermath of the crash that killed Lech Kaczyński, a viral text message circulated among Poles, declaring that “history has come full circle” and hailing the return of “Poland as the Christ of Nations”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Candles lit in tribute to Lech Kaczyński outside the presidential palace in Warsaw, after his death in the 2010 Smolensk air crash. Photograph: Joe Klamar/AFP/Getty Images

The Katyn massacres had been part of a coordinated effort by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1941 to eliminate Poland’s educated classes so as to minimise resistance to the country’s division between the two powers. In 2010, the descendants of the victims of the original massacres had died in the same remote forests alongside a new generation of senior military officers and other members of the governing elite. The resonance was so great that it could not have been an accident. Smolensk was the “new Katyn”.

Though numerous investigations and reports have established that the crash was caused by pilot error amid adverse weather conditions, the Law and Justice party has continued to depict the accident as an assassination of its leader, with blame shared by the usual villainous alliance of liberals and communists. In 2012, Jarosław Kaczyński stood up in parliament to tell Donald Tusk – then Poland’s prime minister – that “in a political sense, you bear 100% responsibility for the catastrophe”.

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As the heirs to the liberals who joined with the communists to construct the corrupt “power system” that the Kaczyński brothers had been railing against for two decades, Civic Platform was accused of conspiring with the heirs to the communists – the Russians – to prevent the investigation into the murder of a president who was on the brink of breaking up the “system”. On the 10th of every month, Law and Justice supporters still gather for protests to demand “the truth”. At a demonstration in Kraków last year, the 67th of its kind, a large banner bore a photo of a smiling Tusk greeting Vladimir Putin, bearing the words: ZDRADA (“betrayal”) and ZBRODNIA (“crime”). The demonstration demanding justice for the victims of Smolensk was held at the monument to the victims of the Katyn massacres.

* * *

The Kaczyńskis’ message that Poland’s problems could be explained by the machinations of unseen forces resonated in a society subjected to rapid political, economic, and social upheaval, and which has a long memory of conspiracy and betrayal by Poles and foreigners alike. Offering Poles a comforting comic-book world in which true patriots do no wrong, the concept of the układ – of treacherous cooperation between the elite and foreign powers – allowed them to portray themselves as the sole heirs to Poland’s heroic tradition of resistance.

It is a concept that has much deeper roots than Poland’s transition from communism to liberal democracy. In the popular memory, it goes back at least as far as the 18th century, when unscrupulous Polish nobles betrayed the country by allying themselves with Catherine the Great. In the Law and Justice worldview, it is not just that Poland’s liberals are the heirs to the treacherous Mazowiecki faction and the rulers of the Polish People’s Republic. They represent Poland’s enemies and traitors throughout history: the heirs to the Soviets, to the Nazis, to the Kaiser, to Catherine the Great.

Jarosław has even suggested that Angela Merkel may have been brought to power by the Stasi

It is an assertion that depends on the notion of Poland eternally under siege. There is no consensus as to precisely who or what poses a threat – it could be Russia or the European Union, it could be multiculturalism, it could be homosexuality, it could be western consumerism, it could be Jews or reds under the bed. What matters is the idea that Poland’s liberals, with their commitment to the nation’s existing institutions and nostalgia for its cosmopolitan past, are doing nothing about it. It is not “nationalism” in the traditional sense but something less coherent, more akin to a mood than an ideology – a narrative of righteousness, victimhood, and self-pity from which anyone can pick their prejudices as they see fit.

Law and Justice leaders and supporters make associations between their political opponents and Poland’s historic enemies and traitors by drawing attention to “suspicious” aspects of their backgrounds. Just before parliamentary elections in 2005, a Law and Justice politician suggested that Donald Tusk’s grandfather had supported the Nazis (as a citizen of the Free City of Danzig, he had been forcibly conscripted into the Wehrmacht, but deserted and joined with Polish troops under British command). Tusk is a Kaszub – a small ethno-linguistic minority centred in parts of north-western Poland historically contested by Poles and Germans; the spokesman was attempting to draw a line backwards from Tusk the Gdańsk liberal to Tusk the disloyal Danzig German. (In January, the Law and Justice politician who made these allegations was appointed director of state television).

Jarosław has even suggested that Angela Merkel may have been brought to power by the Stasi, warning that German investment in Poland might be part of a plan to annex Polish territory: “We could wake up to a smaller Poland some day.” Many Germans find this rhetoric distressing, and cannot understand how Poles cannot see that Germany has changed since the 1940s. But it is precisely because Germany has changed so much that these changes must be loudly denied: most Poles believe in the achievements of Polish-German reconciliation – but if some can be convinced that Germany never changed, then they can easily be convinced that nobody else has changed either. To regard a manifestly hostile Russia as a threat is one thing, but to see modern Germany in the same way is to pass through the looking-glass into a world where nobody can be trusted, where Poland stands vulnerable and alone.

If Germany remains a hostile power, then the European Union can also be regarded as a malign vehicle for German influence. When Günther Oettinger, Germany’s representative on the European Commission, suggested in January 2016 that the Law and Justice government may have contravened EU regulations by taking control of appointments to state media positions, which would initiate EU “supervision” proceedings, the justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro issued an outraged response soaked in puffed-up patriotism: “You demanded that Poland be placed under supervision. Such words, spoken by a German politician, have the worst possible connotations for Poles. For me, too. I am the grandson of a Polish officer who during the second world war fought in [Poland’s] underground Home Army against ‘German supervision’.”

In other words, just as Poland’s enemies and traitors are eternal and ever-present, so must be its defenders and heroes. Law and Justice demonstrations are adorned not only with Solidarity-era symbols, but with those of the Home Army that fought the Nazis; their opponents denounced not only as closet communists, but as the successors to the nobles who betrayed the commonwealth in 1792. Law and Justice claim to be the successors not just to Solidarity, but to the Warsaw uprising in 1944, the officers murdered at Katyn in 1940, the Polish legions who restored statehood in 1918; the rebellions of 1863 and 1830 against Russian imperial rule; the 1794 uprising that sought to salvage the commonwealth from partition: You advocate Germany’s interests because your grandfather was in the Wehrmacht; I advocate Poland’s interests because my grandfather was in the Home Army.

When Lech Kaczyński was buried at the crypt at Wawel Castle in Kraków in 2010, it proved the perfect symbol for Law and Justice’s claim to embody Polish patriotism at its purest. Wawel is Poland’s heavenly boardroom, the resting place of kings, saints, and less than a dozen poets, rulers and resistance heroes of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, now joined by a 21st-century martyr in the struggle for Poland’s freedom. Fittingly, the crypt contains the remains of the messianist poet Juliusz Słowacki, who begged that a restored Poland remember those who had struggled for it, but now lie in their graves:

Oh Poland mine! Remember us

When we can feel no longer; remember

How we framed and fashioned your cause

Both as a prayer of sorrow and as a flash of thunder

Jarosław has been wearing black ever since his brother was laid to rest almost six years ago. In doing so, he hopes to identify his private grief with the grief of all Poles – not just for Smolensk, but for all that has befallen the nation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jarosław Kaczyński on a Law and Justice party election poster in Warsaw in 2007. Photograph: Czarek Sokołowski/AP

* * *

“Law and Justice” is a reference neither to law and order nor social justice, but to the idea that the Polish state itself is lawless and unjust. If the state is illegitimate, the normal rules of political behaviour no longer apply. When an MP from a party supportive of Law and Justice declared in parliament in November that “The good of the nation is above the law,” he received a standing ovation from Law and Justice deputies, including Jarosław Kaczyński. In this way, the takeover of state institutions is presented as national liberation; contempt for the existing legal order as a desire for natural justice.

When demonstrators gathered outside the constitutional tribunal in December to oppose the government’s efforts to paralyse the court, Jarosław depicted the protests as yet another attempt by the “system” to keep hold of its ill-gotten privileges: “This is about whether democracy is able to make decisions instead of a handful of people bought by foreigners and internal forces that don’t serve Polish interests. They don’t want us to disperse this gang of cronies that’s sitting in the bureaucracy.”

Like all good conspiracy theories, the “system” has a coherent internal logic that seeks to explain all things – and, when it fails to do so, explain away the failure to explain that which it cannot explain. The Smolensk catastrophe is a perfect example. The “system” offers a motive: the Russians killed Lech Kaczyński because he was fighting to expunge Poland (and other post-Soviet states) of Russo-communist influence; Civic Platform covered up Kaczyński’s murder because it stood to gain both from the continuation of that Russo-communist influence and from Kaczyński’s demise. It explains the failure to unearth evidence of assassination: because state-appointed aviation experts conducted the investigation, their conclusion that it had been an accident proves that the state remains in the hands of the perpetrators (Law and Justice defence minister Antoni Macierewicz described their investigation as the greatest cover-up “in the history of the world”). Finally, it provides grounds for revenge: in November, a Law and Justice spokeswoman suggested that Donald Tusk might be put before a state tribunal for his role in the cover-up once his term as president of the European Council is over. The existence of the “system” explains Smolensk; Smolensk proves the existence of the “system”.

This circular reasoning helps to make sense of Jarosław’s success in building an electoral coalition around the notion of the układ. The identification of Poland’s liberals with an anti-Polish conspiracy means that one can either begin by believing in the układ, and therefore be convinced of the need to purge the state of liberal influence, or begin by wishing to purge the state of liberal influence, and therefore have an interest in pretending to believe in the układ. The result is a peculiar alliance between the paranoid and the cynical that Poles and foreigners alike struggle to understand.

It is no coincidence that faith in communism depended on exactly the same kind of logic. Contempt for the rule of law; the identification of a minority faction with the interests of the nation; the separation of power from office by constructing extra-legal chains of command; the demonisation of opponents and purges of state structures; an ideological re-interpretation of history: these are all legacies of communist rule. A quarter of a century after the end of communism, the alleged hold of communists over the Polish state is still being used as a pretext to deploy communist-era methods to take hold of the Polish state.

Antithetical to pluralism of any kind, the authoritarian logic of communism demands total victory not just when it comes to politics, but over history as well. When Poles protest against Kaczyński’s attempts to dismantle the independent institutions of the post-1989 republic, they are not just disputing his right to control the media, the civil service, and the judiciary. They are disputing his claim to ownership of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, to the victims of Smolensk and the Katyn massacres, to the national heroes buried at Wawel and the movements they represent; protesting for the right of all Poles to interpret their identity as they see fit and to share in the achievements and failures of their nation’s past as equals.

It remains unclear whether Jarosław is himself a prisoner of the logic of the political system he grew up in, or has simply harnessed it so as to exact revenge on a constitutional order forged in his absence by an establishment that left him in the cold. What is clear is that his refusal to accept that Poland might now be free has made him the most powerful man in one of the largest countries in Europe.

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