What’s the Point?
As Magdalena Moskalewicz pointed out last week in the Washington Post, the idea for a 2017 Women’s Day strike was born in Poland, in the aftermath of the amazing “Black Monday” protests last October (which I wrote about here). Based on my very impressionist sense, not many women here actually stayed home from work on March 8, but the demonstration in the evening was impressive enough. The official estimates from the Warsaw city government had the crowd at 17,000.
Protests are becoming a regular occurrence in today’s Poland, and any reader of this blog knows that people have plenty to protest about. But I’m forced to wonder: what’s the point? Jarosław Kaczyński sees public opinion as something to control, not something that he needs to respond to. The government has shown repeatedly that they have no particular interest in expanding beyond their support base, which currently constitutes about 33% of the electorate, with another 8% supporting an allied party (37% and 9% if only decided voters are considered). PiS’s actions suggest that they intend to hold on to power by tweaking the political system so that their existing base is adequate. For example, they are pushing forward a massive expansion of the boundaries of Warsaw, because only by including a huge swath of the countryside around the city do they stand any chance of ever winning control of the local government. They’ve advanced a proposal (so far at the trial-balloon stage) to institute single-round voting for mayors, as opposed to the current system that requires winning candidates to get 51% of the vote (with runoffs if necessary). Since the opposition remains divided, such a system would allow PiS to win most of the time.
More generally, the rhetoric of the regime is focused on deepening the divisions in Polish society, and cultivating an “us against them” mentality in their supporters. This, I think, is why they seem willing to tolerate protests and the continued existence of an opposition media. In the 20th century, authoritarian regimes attempted to establish monolithic sources of information, but this ended up backfiring. Most people (at least here in Poland) came to distrust the official TV stations and newspapers, and the slogan “the press lies” became popular at demonstrations in the 1980s. Nowadays one hears that slogan at both pro-government and anti-government rallies, albeit aimed at different media outlets.
Truth itself has become a partisan preference, with awkward facts dismissed as if they were just opinions. In this context, PiS does not have to convince most people that their media is right, and they don’t have to suppress the opposition media. In fact, in a perverse way they need the opposition in order to sustain the claim that there is an ongoing struggle for power in which each side is using newspapers and TV to advance their goals. This mobilizes die-hard supporters on all sides, but it leaves an enormous segment of the population—perhaps a majority—frustrated, confused, and disillusioned with public life altogether. Kaczyński is counting on the fact that PiS will remain the largest single political party, even if it stays well short of a majority. He’s probably right: the opposition now includes everyone from socialists to free-market liberals to Christian democrats, and it’s hard to imagine how they could ever create a single unified political organization to compete with PiS.
In other words, the goal is not to turn the PiS worldview into a hegemonic force accepted by nearly everyone. Even Kaczyński must understand that he’ll never accomplish that. Instead, the goal is to build a system that allows a committed and mobilized minority to govern through the application of raw power, demobilizing much of the population and counting on the continued fragmentation of the rest.
This strategy is working, and will probably continue to work for a long time to come. PiS support has remained rock solid, in sharp contrast to every other government in the history of Poland’s Third Republic. It’s not going up, but it’s not going down either. Protests, even large ones, might help mobilize the opposition, but to hard-core PiS supporters, those events just provide evidence that “the enemy” is still strong. This can’t continue forever, but it can go on for many, many years. And the longer it continues, the less energy there will be for protests like yesterday’s. When faced with a government that is uninterested in winning the support of a majority, much less listening to the concerns of any minority, what is the point of taking to the streets?
If PiS deployed old fashioned authoritarian measures—riot police, overt censorship, mass arrests, etc.—then the opposition would have a playbook of responses. Ironically, 21st century authoritarians don’t use those brutal techniques, which both makes them easier to endure and much, much harder to fight.