Two weeks ago, streets in Warsaw and other Polish cities filled with people wearing black. They were protesting against a law aimed at restricting abortion rights further. The colour symbolised the anger and grief of women who suffer. This legislation, if fully implemented, will in effect force some women to give birth to terminally ill children. That same day, a smaller “white protest” was held. Its participants demanded a complete ban on abortions. These opposing protests were a stark illustration of the tensions brewing in my country.

In the international media Poland’s de facto ruler, Jarosław Kaczyński – a nationalist conservative – has been compared with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, or even Vladimir Putin. Stunned, I wonder if Kaczyński really has become like those figures.

I’m part of a generation, now turning 40, that can be described as “children of the revolution”. I remember jumping with excitement as a child when the news broke that Lech Wałęsa, the hero of the 1980s anti-communist opposition, had become Poland’s first freely elected president in 1990. The year 1989 was one of dizzying change and immense hope. By contrast, 2015 – the year that Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party returned to power and set about dismantling checks and balances – was the most bitter. For older liberals who had struggled under communism for democracy to take hold, 2015 ranked as the victory of populist, revanchist and irrational forces. For my generation of liberals, it was a stumbling block. Earlier, we thought we’d be taking responsibility for the country, as ministers or officials. Instead, we found ourselves protesting in the streets, waving Polish and European flags.

It may be tempting to think Poland’s adventure with democracy is coming to a close – or that, confronted by unbridgeable divisions, it is foundering. But I believe that what’s unfolding rather resembles a convulsion of the political system that was built in the 1990s.

We are witnessing an unravelling of the post-communist myths we had long attached to the west – a phenomenon first articulated by the writer Jarosław Kuisz. After 1989, the nation’s transformation was based on an almost entirely uncritical attitude towards western Europe and the US. This was partly due to the fact that people were trying to extract themselves from poverty using western economic models.

But those emerging from behind the iron curtain weren’t striving only for material gains. Western countries also represented a better world in a moral sense. Perceiving the west through rose-tinted spectacles had to come to an end eventually, it seems.

As time passed, and with scandals erupting – such as the revelations about a secret CIA prison in Poland in the mid-2000s – and then the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, many started thinking that western morality could be as ambiguous as the “eastern” brand.

A generation after its democratic breakthrough, Poland found itself in dire need of a new identity. Liberal elites were unable to fill that void. Populists skilfully exploited it. They built a narrative of hostility towards Brussels, western values, and even western lifestyles – all of this leading to the country’s current, deepening international isolation.

Democratic transition in Poland was the accomplishment of a generation of dissidents. But the dividing lines that existed within the 1980s Solidarity movement, between “conservative nationalists” and “liberal conservatives”, are still playing out. The dispute has become ever more radical and personal – with each side demonising the other. Kaczyński and Wałęsa, who are roughly the same age, stand on opposite sides. The first famously burned a puppet of Wałęsa in 1993 during a street demonstration. The second calls Kaczyński a deceitful coward.

In 1989 Polish liberals set out three goals for the country: democracy, a free-market economy, and integration into Nato and the European Union. A quarter of a century on, all this had been accomplished. But the generation who realised those objectives became complacent and failed to create a new sense of political direction. Today’s erosion of the rule of law is extremely worrying and can hardly be ignored. But a return to the pre-2015 period is neither possible nor desirable. Voters have simply become too critical of the flaws in the political setup that emerged from the 1990s. Law and Justice’s victory at the ballot box in 2015 was a result of widespread frustrations overlooked by many.

We seem to be stumbling in the dark, but this phase will surely end. That’s because young people who were born into democracy have no real interest in the grievances of the old politics. Instead, they think of Poland as an umbrella under which everyone can belong, regardless of their political views. Ideological clashes, such as the protests around abortion, have made us realise that the most important task today is to build a common framework for the future.

Discreetly, some hands are being stretched out to try to overcome differences. Within civil society groups and in many private conversations, people from the rival political camps have started talking to each other constructively. In those discussions I’ve seen how exhausted many citizens have become with polarisation. Many are worried that further divisions might even threaten the existence of a common republic. Away from cameras or political podiums, topics such as identity, sovereignty and rule of law are debated in an attempt to identify what can unite us, not what breaks us apart.

Poland is not stuck in its current predicament, it is an evolving scene. It’s obvious that Law and Justice has trampled on the constitution, assaulted the independence of the judiciary, and put pressure on women in ways no other government has dared since 1989. But to draw the conclusion that Poland is inexorably sliding into a new brand of authoritarianism is wrong. It misses nuances and the behind-the-scenes efforts to seek solutions.

EU institutions may well consider imposing sanctions on Poland, which would have a symbolic meaning – but the truth is, only civil society can change the country’s current course. We just need a bit more time.

• Karolina Wigura is a historian and the political editor of the Polish weekly Kultural Liberalna