A year ago I wrote a column warning about political developments in Poland, headlined “The pillars of Poland’s democracy are being destroyed”. There was angry reaction from supporters of Poland’s governing Law and Justice party (PiS), but a year later it’s shocking to see how far the pillars of liberal, pluralist democracy in Poland have been battered and shaken, though not yet destroyed.

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When we apply the shorthand label “illiberal democracy” to Poland it is vital to distinguish between two different things. First, there is the ideological, cultural and policy agenda of the nationalist populist party that won both parliamentary and presidential elections in 2015. This agenda might unkindly be described as systematic anti-liberalism with a seasoning of resentment and paranoia. I don’t like most of this PiS package, but a plurality of those who turned out to vote clearly did prefer it to the alternatives then on offer, and a victorious party has a right to implement its policies.

What it has no right to do is to dismantle or neutralise the institutions that allow an informed public to make that free choice, and that place essential checks and balances on the executive. But this is what has been happening over the last year. I quite often watch Polish public television. Almost overnight, it turned from a slightly dull and only mildly pro-government channel into a PiS propaganda organ. The country’s constitutional court has now been brought effectively under the control of justices close to the ruling party, despite popular protests organised by the Committee for the Defence of Democracy and repeated warnings from Brussels that this violates the EU’s rule of law criteria.

A proposed new law on demonstrations originally suggested, incredibly, that registered protests organised by, say, an opposition party or an NGO could be trumped by a subsequent registration by the government or, wait for it, the church. Over the Christmas holiday, the Polish parliament descended into farce, with opposition MPs staging a sit-in in the main chamber while members of the ruling party passed the national budget by a chaotic show of hands in a neighbouring room. Analysts speculate that the next step may be a change to the electoral law.

What is shocking is not just the speed and ferocity of the anti-liberal assault, masterminded by PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński in a Polish version of what Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary – hence “Orbanisation”. It is the revealed weakness of Poland’s liberal democratic institutions themselves, exacerbated by the generally poor quality of its opposition politicians.

Such a popular mobilisation should not be necessary in a 27-year-old parliamentary democracy

Instead of institutional resilience, Poland has fallen back on its traditional habits of extra-parliamentary protest, with society organising itself in spite of and against the state. Some of these demos have been impressive, especially the so-called “black protests” in which tens of thousands of women, dressed mainly in black, turned out to refuse a proposed Catholic conservative narrowing of the abortion law. But for the most part, when I watch these marches on snowy Polish streets, with the familiar cadences of their chants, and when I hear old Lech Wałęsa say that “patriots must unite” to get rid of PiS by unspecified “clever, attractive and peaceful” means, I laugh with one eye and weep with the other.

I laugh because here are the Poles at it again, incorrigibly standing up for freedom. I weep because such a popular mobilisation should not be necessary in a 27-year-old parliamentary democracy. As Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo cries, “Unhappy the land that has need of heroes.” If you have a well-functioning parliament, an independent constitutional court, impartial public service broadcasting and a professional civil service, you don’t need a Committee for the Defence of Democracy. Liberal democracy is designed to have its own inbuilt defences, as a healthy human body has its immune system.

Now you may say: but Polish democracy is so young! Well, yes, but if this were West Germany, it would already be 1972. Twenty-seven years after its new beginning, out of the ashes of a far worse dictatorship, Germany’s institutional fabric was so much stronger than Poland’s appears to be under this populist assault. I won’t go so far as the old quip that the Germans can make any system work and the Poles can destroy any system, but certainly we see a contrast between a German strength in making the state work and the Polish forte of society organising itself against the state.

What is to be done? In theory the EU could, as early as this March, trigger article 7 of the Treaty on European Union, which envisages sanctions – up to and including suspension of voting rights – against a member state that persists in violating European standards, including the rule of law. In practice, any such move would be blocked by Hungary and probably also by Poland’s new best friend, Britain – which has its own little article to trigger at around the same time. So while expressions of concern from fellow Europeans still matter, what happens in Poland will depend on the Poles.

If a young Pole were to ask me for advice, I would remind him or her of a slogan of the 1968 protest generation in Germany: “the long march through the institutions”. That long march may not be as fun as demonstrating outside parliament, but what Poland needs is principled, educated, energetic people working inside its parliament, its courts, its civil service, schools and media, to strengthen the immune system of a still alarmingly fragile democracy.