Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this year's national Tarkovsky lecture.
It's a tribute to our speaker that we have an absolutely packed house, our speaker who were delighted to welcome for the budget.
Sadoski is probably the most distinguished academic expert on comparative constitutional law, particularly in the post-communist world.
He holds the chair of jurisprudence of Sydney Law School, as well as many positions at European universities.
His books include Rights Before Courts, a study of Constitutional Court in post-Communist Countries, Constitutionalism and the enlargement of Europe,
and most recently and relevantly, Poland's constitutional breakdown, just published by U.P,
copies of which can be bought for a knockdown prise at a table in the hall outside.
Don't miss it! Beside his many academic honours and distinctions, he has one, in my view, a particularly high honour,
which is that he is currently facing no less than three court cases brought against him,
two by two far paved over the public television and one by the Law and Justice Party in Poland, which I have to say counts very high.
Well, also delighted to have our own Professor, Yang Zelenka, as Discussant Yang Geelong,
who started his studies actually studying law as well as politics in his native Poland.
He is a professor of European politics here and a fellow of the centre, and his two last books are particularly relevant to the subject today.
His penultimate book was called Is the EU Doomed Question Mark?
And his last book was called Counterrevolution Liberal Europe in Retreat.
So without more do please join me in welcoming this year's Kukowski lecture in.
Thank you very much, Tim. Thank you all for coming. Thank you to St Antony's College for hosting me.
Thank you. My is St. Anthony's friends, calypso yarn and this wonderful team that works and that has helped to organise this meeting.
And of course, thank you very much for coming on a Friday afternoon when I suppose most of you have much better things than that.
It's a great pleasure and honour.
And in particular, it's of course, a great honour to speak in honour of or to celebrate the memory of Alicia Kukowski.
So I would like to begin this lecture with a quote from one of the most famous essays by Kukowski,
written quite entertainingly, but at the same time with great seriousness called Politics and the Devil,
and it suddenly point by the end of his essay,
Kukowski says about about the devil and about various sort of invidious things that the devil does in in politics.
The following. He takes up the principle of majority rule and distorted by suggesting the attractive
idea that the majority as such is right and is therefore entitled to do anything,
including abolish the very principle of the majority entitled to do anything, including abolish the very principle of majority.
And that, I think is a good motto for an account of what has happened in Poland over the over the last five years or so.
When a party which came to power with impeccable majority legitimacy during the first term in office has dismantled old institutions,
processes and practises which render the principle of majority rule both meaningful and attractive.
As you know, a month ago, after a month and a week ago,
the Polish sovereign Polish electorate massively decided to renew the democratic mandate to peace,
as I will be calling Law and Justice Party by its Polish acronym.
And this victory was absolutely decisive and unquestionable.
Peace has got over two million votes more than it had in 2015,
so it was almost unique in Polish post-communist history that a party in power
the incumbent has actually increased its vote in takes rather than decrease.
It got over three million votes,
more eight million to five million than the next party or actually coalition so-called civic coalition and in the elections,
and it has maintained its absolute majority in the lower house of Parliament to 165 votes.
Seats out of 460 are and all that within a very high by Polish standards, electoral turnout of sixty one point seven percent.
So of course, and and it has achieved this victory despite the following fact that over the last four years,
it has first paralysed the Constitutional Tribunal and convert it into an active and enthusiast.
The helper of the government, too,
has subjected regular courts starting from the Supreme Court and ending with the lowest court to increased political pressure and control,
including the so-called disciplinary system basically of harassing and persecuting independent judges.
Three are turning Electoral Commission's into the all instruments subjected to the Minister of Internal Affairs for making a joke of the law
making process by basically passing all of the most important pieces of legislation through some sort of fast track without any consultation,
etc. Five. Establishing a widespread system of supposed and patronage in the state owned industries.
Six. Converting the public media. Really vulgar propaganda device or instruments for the ruling party.
Seven. From a position of relatively impotent, even though not in the euro area,
actor or player within the EU, it has reduced Poland to the very far fringes of the EU,
with Poland having this doubtful distinction of being the first member state
against whom the Article seven sanctioning procedure has been established,
etc., etc.,
etc. So I could go on and on and and continue this litany of various political and constitutional mythical acts of misconduct of the ruling party.
But I hope you'll excuse me from leaving. Thank me for not continuing, because that would take the more the whole evening.
The question, of course, is why has it happened? But before I try to address this question,
let me say that I have deliberately used a certain very distorting shortcut
articulation by saying that the electorate indeed of the sovereign did this,
etc. In fact, Poland now is divided and polarised in an totally unprecedented way.
And while eight point eight million voters voted for peace, eight point eight million voted for entirely peace parties,
with seven percent of voters voting for so-called anti systemic party confederations.
So depending on how you consider it, you may added two entities in which case we will have a clear plurality at least,
or even a majority of votes against base or even counted on the side of any democracy.
You have more or less 50 50 division political divisions in Polish society,
with the small number of undecided voters with a declining number of voters sort of who transfer their loyalty from party to party.
So the this more or less 50 50 party political division became consolidated.
Further, this political division is correlated with social stratification to an increased degree,
so it is the sort of polarisation that similar Martin Lipsett called segmental rather than overlapping.
This is a division which is also highly memorialised in the sense that we consider them people.
On the other side of this piece, anti-peace divide not only wrong, but who are deeply mistaken, but also fundamentally evil.
And also it's largely negative in the sense that the intensity of hatred for the others is
higher than the intensity of our loyalty and allegiance to people who think alike locally.
And while this polarisation perhaps doesn't fully explain the causes for the popularity of this authoritarian populism,
that war that governs Poland now sort of is an important part of any count because I think there is a
degree of consensus in political science in this sort of burgeoning industry of studying populism.
That polarisation is very favourable to populism, which sort of makes sense when you think of it is, I mean, after all,
populists use this language of us versus them of having to strengthen inside loyalty
against the outsiders as an important engine in their rhetoric and ideology.
And there has been recently published a very interesting book by Greek scholar Takis Pappas called Populism and Liberal Democracy,
where he makes this point very well that the higher degree of populism, the higher likelihood of victory of topics,
so higher degree of polarisation, the higher likelihood for populists to it.
But as I said, it may be an important aspect of the background account of circumstances in Poland and actually
doesn't explain fully why Kaczynski and his party have enjoyed such spectacular growth and success.
So what are the.
Because of that, in political science, there is a distinction between two types of explanations of support and contestation of democracy.
And they point on the one hand at structural causes.
On the other hand, on what is what gets this ugly word agent or agent causes, right?
So. So the structure explanations seem to be much more rational.
They point at long term factors that factors related to the voters and the factors which only indirectly affect politics.
If. And structural explanations have this great attractiveness to them that they do not ask us to assume that voters are irrational,
ignorant or plain stupid, which sort of doesn't sound good.
The problem is that those structural explanations do not actually do the proper work.
The the structural factors greatly under determine the growth of populism in countries such as Poland or Hungary.
Now, in the beginning of 2015, in journal Democracy,
there was a great piece by two American natural and American and Canadian political scientists, Steven Levitsky and and look on way.
Where are they sort of summarised their findings about what countries are not hospitable for democratisation?
In other words, in what structural environment democracy is unlikely to persist and to become consolidated.
So it was the beginning of 2015. They must have submitted this article in 2014.
So on the eve of Polish debacle, but already halfway through the developments in Hungary,
and they put together the following structural cases where just don't expect democracy to win.
First, they side are very weak, very weak states with low economic growth, great blight sub-Saharan Africa or,
in contrast, very high growth, very high economic growth states with single party system China, Singapore, Malaysia.
Then, they said, dynastic monarchies with oil Persian Gulf.
Then they said, countries with very low linkage to the West Central Central Asia.
And finally, uh, and finally, they said and I have forgotten the first one, but it may it may come to me.
It may come to me in that moment in any event. None of these structural characteristics in any way resembles the situation of Poland and Hungary.
Strong linkages. Linkages? Oh yeah. The first one was the state born out of violent revolution like Cuba, the opium.
None of this applies to Poland and Hungary. Not not even oil, unfortunately.
So I remember having had that discussion with one of the greatest political scholars in the study of
of democratisation who also happens to be of Polish background Adam Silver and why you and I ask him,
how do you understand why these things are happening now in Poland?
I asked him about a year ago, remember in the avalanche, in a cafe in Greenwich Village, and he said, I don't know.
I simply can't understand and feel so many people that in his interview with Yeltsin Schakowsky political.
Now, if it's of course, he doesn't understand that no one, no one understands.
So I think that you have to start from another angle and to for the time being,
abandon those structural attempts at explanation and look at what is called a gigantic side of the thing that is,
rather than demand supply side and politics.
Look at the behaviour of the political leaders rather than voters at short term
factors rather than long terms and the factors which directly affect politics.
And here, I think that one way of understanding the success of peace is to enquire into the sort of narrative,
the sort of discourse that the Yaroslav Kaczynski presented to Polish society as its own special brand of populism.
Now, one word about populism. There is this temptation to believe that since we are using the same word of populism related to
Brexit and Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump and Erdogan and Putin and Kaczynski and and and so on,
then there must be the same phenomenon behind it. Mistake.
You know, there is not a single populism. There are populism in plural, because populism is a sort of.
Response, although it's Aberrational and and in my view, false response to real problems,
real problems are different in different countries because they respond to sort of country specific circumstances.
It's a little bit like, you know, to to paraphrase this too often quoted first sentence from Anna Karenina,
you know that, you know, every happy family is the same. All unhappy families are unhappy in their different ways.
One may say that probably all happy or established democracies are sort of similar,
but all on successful and consolidated democracies are unsuccessful and on consolidating their own different ways.
And that applies to populism. So, for instance,
there is a sort of near consensus amongst American scholars about the sources
of Trump's and before Tea Party success that it basically responds to anxiety,
economic anxieties of middle and lower middle class,
especially of male white middle Americans, plus their fear and concern about globalisation, like exporting their jobs elsewhere,
where the labour costs are lower and importing cheap stuff to the states mainly, of course, from China, India, Indonesia, etc.
So I think that in the case of Europe, of Central European populism, the conditions or the factors which trigger local populism are quite different.
But what is common is that a successful populist leader manages to put together a package response,
which responds to more than one types of concerns and anxieties.
So my simple theory for a success of populism, Alla Kuczynski,
is that he was successful in putting together three themes which do not necessarily logically sort of go together.
But he was very smart in 2015 and then repeating it in 2019 to present to the people a package huge response to three types of concerns.
First, anti-establishment, second anti modernism, third and others.
That is, xenophobic. Anti establishment in 2015 was obvious.
It was against the incumbent. It was about against this sort of civic platform.
And its allies, who had ruled for more than one term were arrogant and insensitive to real people
and plenty so it prefigure the anti establishment discourse of 2019 and 2019.
Of course, it couldn't have been repeated because these guys, I mean, Kaczynski and his guys have been in power for the last four years,
but they meant still to present themselves as sort of dissidents and to the big their enemies as being the mainstream of the elite.
And of course, the worst. The most hated part of this elite were judges or.
Liberal media love to fall in or Polish representatives in Europe.
So with with Donald Tusk in particular, etc. So they still managed.
I mean, the anti-establishment rhetoric of 2015 prefigured anti-elite, a narrative of of 2019.
The second one was anti modernism was mainly in pernicious conditions, anti secularism, slogans against feminism, against equality, of of of genders,
against all the sort of secularist enlightenment themes which they managed to present as some sort of contaminated fruits of West European decadence.
And the third one was anti-EU are those that are xenophobic. In 2015, it was clear it was mainly into refugees and the Muslim,
anti-Islam and Thai terrorists, etc. They they are not going only to endanger our security.
They are also going to undermine our identity, our cohesion, our community.
In 2019, it was difficult to persist in this because the refugee crisis or so-called refugee crisis in Europe has greatly declined.
So they found another in this some internal, others LGBT.
Gender ideas. It's important to have an enemy whom you can to mobilise the people, the people against.
And I think that these three films have been the winning proposition, both in 2015 and 2019.
They were greatly infused with paranoia and I'm using kill the concept of paranoia.
Not in a clinical sense, of course, but in a purely political sense,
as a Richard Hofstadter did in his famous classical 1964 essay on the paranoid state in American politics.
And he saw all that in Poland. That is this idea that politics is a stage of this Manichaean struggle between the good and the evil,
and our leader is the only thing which stands between us and the total disaster and the enemy.
So on the one hand, they are pathetically weak because, of course, real society that doesn't support them.
On the other hand, they are incredibly dangerous because they are so desperate.
You know, you can hear the echoes of Stalin's idea that class struggle actually intensifies with the weakening of the bourgeoisie, etc.
And to this, Liberal Democrats were unable to present an equally attractive counter-narrative to the counter-narrative
to counter discourse of civic platform and other Liberal Democrats was at the same time meek and arrogant,
which come to think of it as the is the horrible combination.
It wasn't me because it was playing on the ground.
Determined by piece, Kuczynski drew an agenda within which we kept responding.
But we were always on the defensive.
We always response civic platform that prided itself on being a centrist party was only centrist, not in a positive ideological way,
but in the sense that it was sort of encircled by piece from the left, by its social welfare rhetoric, from the right, by its identity politics sense.
In a sense, peace and policy platform was caught in this ambush sort of some sort of blackmail in which it could
only respond with an increasingly narrow ground fully determined and and controlled by critics.
And so that's about this supply side, about the supply of winning rhetoric by Polish populace.
But of course, it's only one half of the story because the true source of success to populists is to what extent there is a
good congruence between the supply and the demand between what political leaders say and what people expect.
And of course, Kaczynski kept telling people exactly what they wanted to hear.
We Liberal Democrats, we seem to be arrogant because we seem to sort of raise the bar too high.
He kept saying, Well, maybe you are, you know, maybe you are not educated enough.
Maybe you're not enlightened enough. Maybe you are ignorant of something.
Maybe maybe you express some prejudice and stereotypes.
Well, I do know it's not a good thing to say to your voters why Kaczynski kept saying, Do not be ashamed of who you are.
You should be proud of it. You hate LGBT fine.
You know that's who you are. Don't apologise for it. Be proud of it.
You know, we don't do these sort of things here, you know, around here in Poland.
So, so here there's always this edge that he was telling people what they wanted to
hear without somehow raising the bar of the test for their intelligence knowledge.
And if you like morality, you hate would be refugees from Syria or wherever.
You don't have to be embarrassed about it. It is your identity.
Absolutely be proud. But the main conference between the supply and demand came, of course, at the level of social welfare.
This is absolutely true that are different groups in post-communist Poland,
but never benefited from the fruits of economic post 1999 transition to a different degree and all while probably there were very few.
And I'm here on a rather thin ice because I'm not an economist.
There were very few absolute losers. There were many relative losers in terms of relative deprivation.
We all know, as we all know, relative deprivation is probably the most important factor in the sense of social injustice.
You know it from Runciman, from the old grandma grandpa around, Runciman wrote above it about the force of relative deprivation,
and the many people indeed felt fairly that the advantages from the transition do not benefit them to the same degree as they can see,
especially with the rise of all the new, sometimes illegitimate, sometimes illegitimate fortunes.
So here he's provided an ingenious response.
Rather than having a real welfare state type of social policy,
it decided to print and give away cash, which you know, which of course, is a horrible solution.
From point of view.
Both of social justice and economic rationale and point of economic rationality is because it's totally unsustainable in the long term.
It costs about 10 billion euro per year.
You know, the only DeFi, so hold 500 plus system of of support for children are it's my work now, maybe next year, maybe in two years time.
Who can who can assure that when the downturn comes, the budget can support.
And of course, inflation will be much part of it. But it's also very unjust because it basically means privatisation of social services
means that people are given cash without any public goods being additionally produced,
so there's no increase in supply. There's an increase in demand in cash based demand.
Not a single new school. Not a single new hospital bed.
Not a single new centre for care over seniors has been produced over the four years of his government,
but people got lots of money and that makes them happy. They they can see it in the wallet.
This is like an instant gratification.
Without consideration of the long term consequences of that and that instant gratification produced this instant gratitude to the government and.
And in addition, it came in a package of the dignitary type of rhetoric in the recent great piece by Tim in New York, review of books,
team reports, his conversations and also and one one one of the students with whom team talk says they gave people their dignity.
And indeed, that was the dominant rhetoric. Money is dignity there.
Their wallet is higher dignity. And how can we win with our arguments about technicalities on how you elect National
Council of Judiciary against a grandiose things such as giving people dignity?
We could. But now there is now that I've mentioned this council of Jurisprudence, there's also the question.
But OK, so we have that type of, you know, social welfare, uh, supply.
But what about this sense of anxiety or concern about all the dismantlement of this system,
of the rule of law and courts and democracy that I had mentioned right at the beginning of this lecture?
How come people became so effectively desensitised to it that the voters in the end or at least those 44 percent of voters of peace?
For them, it didn't count very heavily on their calculus, and they were prepared to look the other way when voting for peace.
And it and now I'm putting on my hat as a constitutional lawyer and I may say, Well, that's because that's how the contemporary.
Authoritarianism works, it works in an incremental way,
rather than having this sort of points turning point in which the rule of law is abolished overnight.
It works through the. Not by individual actions taken separately, but by the invidious connexions made between different acts and different laws.
So it's not always so easy for non-lawyers, not technicians, to see.
It's sort of obscure. It's almost invisible. But how does the new law about prosecutor general connect with the new Law of
National Council of Jurisprudence and the way the new Law of Supreme Court?
I mean, it really takes a lot of technical knowledge, and also because contemporary authoritarians such as urban Kaczynski,
to some extent their ground, do not formally speaking abolish the institutions so they don't declare it Constitutional Court non-existent.
They hollow them out of their original meaning, so they turn them.
Into the instruments. Serving the goal totally opposite than their original raison d'etre.
So take Constitutional Court in Poland. I mean, like everywhere in the world.
If there's one thing that any Constitutional Court does, it is being counter majoritarian.
It is being to provide a check upon the exercise of power by the majority in the legislation and the executive.
It might do many other things unless it does that. That's not really a crime.
It might say under the Constitution, certain things are illegitimate, even if the majority wants it.
But in Poland? Well, Constitutional Court on 2015 in a very imperfect way.
It been sort of by and large and you see, I'm extremely, extremely tentative about it, played that role in Poland.
The Constitutional Court has been the first effectively disabled for the entire year, the year of 2016 and run by late by December 2016.
Piece got majority of judges and quasi judges on Constitutional Tribunal.
It started playing the opposite role that of a helper of an assistant to the government
or not to reduce political costs of bringing about lots of anti-constitutional,
such as on the elections of the National Council of Judiciary,
including its judicial segment by the Parliament, i.e. by the ruling party, i.e. by the leader.
OK, so so that's that's the way it works. But but the institution is still there.
There is a building. There is the name. There are people who wear their judicial robes.
They behave as if they wear constitutional judges and too many people maybe somehow obscure.
But what they are doing actually is the opposite to what they were supposed to do under constitutional, under constitutional rules.
So part of the move and occasionally, well,
occasionally quite often piece has been blatantly violating and breaching explicit texts of the Constitution.
But they not always had to do it because what they basically did is to violate the unwritten norms behind the Constitution.
Unwritten rules, the rules, the constitutional provisions,
which you can read between the lines and we all constitutional lawyers know that you cannot read the Constitution only with the text you have there.
You have to read it in the context of various conventions and norms and unwritten rules which give sense and meaning to those reading words.
Why people behave, whether something is unwritten, then that's not not part of the package.
OK, I'm coming slowly to an end of this lecture. So let me raise the question.
Well, what are what sort of general lessons can we draw from the Polish case?
Because I can understand that for some of us, at least, Poland is not like the epicentre of the world.
This is not the most important country in the world. So to people who are not like young Salonika or me or Professor Norman Davis, you know,
Poland may be just one of the case studies which are as interesting or uninteresting as any other country.
So if Poland as a case study, what is it a case study of?
And I would offer three possible or interesting lessons which can be drawn, which are more general and universal than just about Poland itself.
So the first one is about.
Populist, and that is that a relationship between populism and democracy.
There is this rather popular and influential theory that populism is perhaps even a welcome,
perhaps even a beneficial democratic corrective to excessively liberal democracy.
Or, as Cass mother put it, it's an illiberal democratic response to non-democratic liberals illiberal democratic
response to non-democratic liberals so that it enhances this forgotten or ignored,
ignored by US liberals. Democratic participant representative ingredient of democracy.
In my view, the Polish and Hungarian cases show it's a total and utter nonsense.
There's absolutely nothing democratic about what Kuczynski has been doing over the last year.
Whatever theory or conception of democracy, you have deliberative,
participatory or direct or indirect or whatever the rule of Kaczynski was anti pluralist.
So that is purely and squarely majoritarian of the winner takes all type,
totally non deliberative, rejecting any parliamentary mechanisms of deliberation.
Certainly against direct democracy. The only proposal for a referendum,
a grotesque proposal but still raised by the president was shared or rejected by by peace against freedom of expression, at least pluralism in media.
So whatever one can say about Kaczynski, there is nothing democratic in any conventional understandings of democracy that we that we may have.
So there may be some other populism which bring in a welcome democratic correction to the liberal democracy,
to democracy by non representative bodies. But you know, things such as non-elected agencies, tribunals, central banks, et cetera.
But sadly, the East European brand of populists is not that kind of democratic correction.
The second general lesson is about what I would call the end of the transitional paradigm,
and that is that in 1999 and later, and I'm now not talking only about the fall of communism,
but about the whole third wave for apartheid full of authoritarian regimes in East Asia, full of military regimes in Latin America, et cetera.
There was a certain sense of feeling that we have entered on a certain trajectory which begins with electoral democracy,
with installing elections in a particular state. And sooner or later, the state will become fickle and robustly democratic.
Now, in his article, which I referred to in a New York review of books as well, it really wasn't the case in countries like many of us didn't share.
They're the sort of liberal optimists, actually. We are very worried and afraid.
And there was this sense of anxiety, and it's absolutely true. True.
But from the outside, when one looks, for example, at my scholarly discipline, this is a comparative constitutional law.
There was this type of optimistic. Now we see naive idealism that we are on the right path,
and things may only get better even if there are occasionally in our times and and short periods of declining of a backsliding in the long term.
The transition from A to B means from all sorts of non-democratic states to be which is liberal democracy as we know it, wherever it is Canada,
in Australia and Sweden, for whatever is your favourite exemplar of a well-functioning democracy, now we see it actually hasn't happened.
There are studies which show that the majority have be preferred of the cases of democratic
deconsolidation in the recent years are brought about by and by elected by freely elected leaders.
So the setting up of electoral democracy doesn't guarantee that you end up with anything like a liberal democracy that is democracy,
which respects also separation of powers, the rule of law and civil and political rights.
You may have a very dramatic backsliding like in Poland and Hungary or Romania, and at some sort of uneasy pothole as Russia and Ukraine,
which is neither the conventional oppressive authoritarianism nor a fake democracy.
And there is no sense, no trap, no sense of evidence that we are moving in this direction in which transitional paradigm seemed to promise we would.
And the third point is, the third lesson will be about if I may say so us.
So let me use this first person, plural, to try to embrace.
Alas, only metaphorically, most of us in this room.
And that is what it is.
What sort of lessons should we draw from the current debacle from this phenomenon of entrenched populist populism, which in turn to the second term?
Of their rule, like in Poland, Hungary before in Venezuela, and so.
And I would say that for us, the main challenge is to resist the double temptation on the one hand of self-flagellation,
on the other hand of complacency or self self self-satisfaction.
Both are equally bad. We should reject the self-flagellation, the sort of we were stupid.
You know, we made some horrible mistakes. We paved the way to pop, you know, maybe not.
Maybe there was very little that could be done in the face of those very committed, energetic, dynamic authoritarians.
But we also should reject the other extreme of this complacency.
And I think there is a space between both temptations,
and this space is the space for a rational self-reflection about how we failed to fulfil the promise of liberal democracy.
However, liberal democracy wasn't faithful to its own promises in all its richness, including egalitarian or secular secularist richness.
So we should aim at a positive vision, but positive vision,
which will not be just the shadow of their populist exclusionary policy of somehow celebrating the majority against various minorities.
We should try to reach out to the voters for populists, always understanding the various moral and electoral defects of their leaders,
of the triumphs or their parents or bonds of this world do not necessarily cannot be extrapolated to their voters.
But at the same time, without sacrificing without sacrificing what is most important and most valuable for us now,
that is respect for minorities, compassion, supremacy of the Constitution and the importance of civil and political rights.
Look, I have begun with the quotation from Kuwait Kosky sort of me and this lecture with Richard Gorkov.
But by the end of the year, so from which I quote to the beginning, he says,
the struggle between the devil and God in history is not a merry spectacle.
The only comfort we have comes from the simple fact that we are not passive observers or victims of this contest, but participants as well.
And therefore our destiny is this decided on the field on which we lost.
And there are two takeaways for me from this message. One is when he mentions this grandiose word of destiny because it highlights for
me how great the stakes of today's struggle against populists of the returns are.
In fact, those stakes couldn't be higher because they, they and their ideologues assault our liberty and its very core.
And so it evokes, for me, Kafka's Process or Huxley's New Brave World on Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale.
These are these are the stakes, and that's how we are being assaulted, and we should be aware of that.
But then he also says at the end of the sentence that our destiny is decided on the field on which we run.
So, you know, as of today, as of this lecture,
no social movement in the world came with some sort of inevitability or invent invincibility built into it.
You want to look around. Perhaps you can already see paradoxically today after this second very,
very disconcerting victory of Kaczynski in Poland, sort of the seeds of their own defeat.
We can see the new mayor of Istanbul, Iran and my God, we can see a of China in Budapest.
Can this is unacceptable in Slovakia. You can see Alexander +210 just go skiing in Warsaw.
So these are there may be the signs that the populists are past their moment.
We can all also see this very uneasy but still under the control of the Democratic opposition over the Senate in power.
So no Justice Caucus said nothing is decided on the field on which will Iran do Iran and Iran and Iran.
And I don't know. We'll keep running. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, like a real firecracker of a lecture before I hand over to young.
There is one seat here, so if someone sitting uncomfortably on the floor is brave enough to come forward, you could have a great.
I got enough. Secondly, I'm Columbia.
Do you think we could just have the door open for a baby just to give a bit of draught?
Just give us a map. Thanks so much. Young thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. OK, I'm delighted to be part of this discussion because my friendship with the speaker goes many years back.
It was the 1970s and he was at such a moment when I was a graduate student.
He was my ghost supervisor and always ghost supervisor.
So it's not somebody he's not. Ghost Writer doesn't mix it up it, but there.
But it was something close, though, because he writes draughts of my, my,
my thesis and before I handed it over to my supervisors who after and his comments and and critique hardly ever had anything to add.
So of course I own him. But but also because it is in a sense, also a kind of promotion of his book,
which I highly recommend you to read it, which is basically focussed slightly on different topic.
It's more there's more jurisprudence rather than politics there, but but it rates it in a very fascinating way.
You know, one of the trials he has now is because he called police a criminal organisation.
I don't know what the judge was saying. The N probably depends for would be a judge.
But I can tell you that his book reads like a criminal novel.
It is. It is jurisprudence you want really to read and and don't read it before you go to bed because you can just keep going back.
So it is really something I do you recommend, and I frankly think that Shokalskiy will be proud of what you listening to here today and so on.
The attitude that he's not no longer with us. OK, I I will not questions anything what he said.
I just. Maybe you should try to ask him to to make some of his position even sharper that he did.
Let's start with his basic thesis that this is basically about agency and structure agency.
So if this is about agency Voytek, there are two possible scenarios.
A piece is the Genesis organisation.
They really understand how what people want, how to get goes to the voters who always voted for us liberals and how to kind of get them on the side.
And that was by actually three times, right?
And the other explanation for those successes is that they are not so genius.
But but liberals are doing so badly that maybe peace didn't have anybody to lose the last series of elections for various reasons.
So which which is, is this for you more credible?
I know that I've put it in a sharp way, but you know you cannot always say on the one hand.
On the other hand, because this of course, changes the focus of discussion.
If you want to get out of this. You know you. You know, you have to to focus on on on the explanation.
Now you say that this was larger about the winning narrative.
Well, but do you really think that narrative, if it is not credible, can bring you very far?
For instance, if if you claim as a liberal, that actually we are in favour of social policy, we are even in favour of 500 plus.
Yeah, but when we wave power, although the country grew 25 percent, you know, over a decade, we always thought we cannot afford any social policy.
And and to that end, we basically denied inequalities we today there are studies of Piketty Group,
which actually showed that Poland is the most unequal country in Europe, and precariat was presented as the best way to generate growth in Poland.
And if, of course, if your economy like in Greece shrinks 25 percent rather than growth 35 percent.
And if you are on the constraint of the fiscal compact, then these discussions are the truth.
But in this particular case, I look at my, especially its social policy.
Well, there is something to discuss.
How can you have a narrative on social policy fit with the record like this, but we can go to other fields, you know, like environmental concerns.
I remember Premier Coach CAPAC going to EU Summit on the Environment, saying that we will veto everything which will stop Poland be,
you know, producing CEO by our terrific mining companies or human rights.
You know, how come that we took eagerly park, you know, in the war, which was not only unique outback, but which brought terrible civilian death.
And then we even welcome.
CIA, a secret comes and when the European Court of Justice requested to pay compensation to the victims of torture, we had only some excuses.
Yes, yes, we're against torture. But but you know, you're part of our violence.
And I can go for a long time. But you see if you want to have a narrative, you have to be credible.
No, I'm not going to say that the narrative of peace is credible.
I fully agree with what you said. But if you have nobody to know storm situations is somewhat tricky.
Then, you know. One of these issues, maybe, and here I should finish.
But, you know.
This issue of majority and democracy, look, this quote of Lashkar Kosky refer to the to the Leninist principle false power in the hands of Soviet.
This is what I have in mind. And liberal democracy was not about all power to the Soviets.
It was about constitutional order, which guaranteed minorities the rights division of power independence, of course in particular.
And you use your beautiful spell it out.
And there were good reasons why we delegated powers from majoritarian institutions to two courts,
but also even two central banks of the European Commission. I mean, look at the autumn and Nordic Greek colleagues who who you know who,
where the discussions about fiscal compact and the and the troika policy following the Greek referendum was very contested.
But at the same time, you know, if you sign up to certain arrangements, you will not necessarily.
Why should Greek voter meet the positions to tear to Dutch or German voter what to do with their money?
So you can argue. So we know why we have done it equally.
You know, on central banks week, we gave power to central banks,
so the government doesn't just spend money it doesn't have before elections to to buy certain groups of electorate.
But this is all true. But the danger is always that you and you wrote all your life about these dilemmas,
particularly when it happened in Hungary for the first time in the 1990s that you know that you cannot ignore parliament altogether to.
That, you know, that said that because otherwise you come to the situations,
as we saw in in Podemos demonstrations in Spain, when when people who argued will have a vote, but we don't have a voice.
We can elect government, but we cannot change policies.
This usually has to do not with institutional arrangements, but but but the power of the markets which slipped under outside democratic control.
Right. I think this is the major problem here, but it has something to do with also, you know,
experts taking decisions on behalf of so-called directly elected representatives.
And here, I want to ask you where that balance is because I fully agree with you that you cannot that democracy is not just about elections.
But can we have democracy without elections?
Of course, this doesn't justify a piece, and it's rhetoric, I'm fully convinced that if tomorrow the opposition takes over parliament,
they will argue the other way around, saying, well, Constitutional Court has powers to stop all laws adopted by by liberals,
so they would go the other way around because it shows the argument they will control Constitutional Court,
which they start with their people now and they lose maybe parliamentary majority.
But the same applies the other way around.
Because if I hear or read arguments now criticising a piece for its effort to change to the retirement arrangements,
saying had we had Constitutional Court, which is independent, it would never allow the change of pension system to be introduced.
Then I ask myself, Is it the best way to approach the topic, right?
So this is a serious dilemma. And I wonder where you stand on this because this defines what we call Democrats to some extent.
And this isn't, you know, and this this also concerned this other external factors about which you write in in the
last part of your book a lot is the strategy to argue in Brussels on this strategy,
to argue in villages where where you lost your loyal voters.
We know how it was in Hungary, where for number of years our liberal friends were more present in capital cities than in villages in Hungary,
and we know how we then did only now when they really started grassroots work in Budapest.
It has changed. So I think these are two small questions which you hopefully will address,
and I leave everything else to the public, which I can show you in this room is more than eager to debate.
The chair will simply stop the international crisis and the opportunity to respond very briefly to Young's points.
And then we'll go for the public. Well, my my answer is very simple because I agree with both main points that you made.
I agree with the fact that the Liberals have done very,
very bad job both on the ground and in the narrative that is that the government of civic platform and its earlier iterations,
etc. hasn't produced any good, robust social policy in Poland.
And that probably was the main source of the anxiety. It hasn't produced good, free quality education, health care, social services,
etc. The point is that peace hasn't produced anything as an alternative.
It produced a cruel lie by privatising social policies, by giving people money at the level of the narrative.
Yes, of course. So that's at the level on the ground of the level of narrative.
It is true that the civic platform was extremely defensive and hasn't produced any positive,
exciting vision other than countering piece about a certain point.
It was basically like fighting tooth proportions.
Are the fascist fascist assault on democracy in, you know?
What else can you concentrate, concentrate and focus on when it comes to relations and between majoritarian democracy,
and there is no major Italian checks built into it?
Again, I very much sympathise with what he said.
And in fact, before 2015, I was sort of a critic of Polish Constitutional Tribunal began believing that Poland and other post-communist democracies.
But prior to all this backsliding,
with much too far in disabling the parliaments and truly democratic institutions by establishing those counter majoritarian elitist institutions.
But there's a good argument when the tension between the courts and the parliamentary is a relatively low level when there is an all out assault,
as was the case of Yeltsin against Russia, the Constitutional Court in 1990s.
Or by urban or by by Kaczynski and earlier with less success, by by virtue of clouds in Czech Republic.
I mean, it's a bit of a luxury to think, but you know what should be really?
The balance between the counter majoritarian majoritarian institutions, counter majority citizens are basically dismantled.
So in this case, we need to defend them.
And in a sense, going into the fine detail about, you know, how to fine tune this relationship to leave it for better times.
Thanks very much for.