A New Era in Poland?

Aweek or so before I was due to travel to Warsaw, my text messages were filled with photos of Poland’s Independence Day. They had all the elements of your typical national celebration: streets dense with people, flags aloft over the heads of the crowd, and what appeared to be detonated smoke bombs tinting the dusk with chalky red and white, the colors of Poland’s flag. The photos recalled images I’d seen in the news from the rally on October 1, a gathering of nearly a million people just ahead of the elections that ousted the Law and Justice Party from power. While all the flags and colored smoke on November 11 commemorated Poland’s liberation from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 and the establishment of the modern Polish state, this year they also seemed to celebrate an important new epoch that began in 1989: a collective movement toward, and excitement about, liberal democracy. While authoritarianism seems to be cresting in other European countries, Poland at this moment appeared to show the potential for a kind of populism that wasn’t right wing.