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Agata Szymanska-Medina is a Polish visual artist, photojournalist, and storyteller based in Berlin, Germany. She graduated in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover, Germany. Her work focuses on long-term multimedia projects that address socio-political issues.
Her work has been published in DER SPIEGEL, Stern, DIE ZEIT, ARTE TV, The Guardian, Aperture Magazine, Politiken, and SZ-Magazine. Her projects have received support from the Magnum Foundation, the European Cross-Border Grant for investigative journalism – Journalismfund. eu, the Robert Bosch Foundation, VG Bild-Kunst, and the Pulitzer Center. She received the Lotto Brandenburg Photography Art Prize in 2021, the German-Polish T. Mazowiecki Journalist Award in 2020 and was nominated for the German Reporter Award in 2020.
Instagram: @agataphotographydotcom
Illiberal Democracy in Poland
By: Elisabeth Zerofsky
Many of the words used to describe Poland in the 21st century are superlative. Poland is the growth champion of Europe, having experienced a 30-year economic miracle, and expanding faster than any country of comparable development since communism ended in 1989. Indeed, Poland’s economy was the only European economy that did not fall into recession after the 2008 global financial crisis. During the 1980s, it was the Polish anti-communist movement that brought some of the first capitulations of the communist regime in Eastern Europe. Poland has been called the poster child, and model student, of democratization in the post-Soviet bloc. To visit Warsaw or Krakow today is to experience these cities’ dynamism, and to revel in a cultural renaissance that has been ongoing for the last 30 years.
Yet, in 2015, when the right-wing Law and Justice Party, headed by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, came to power, Poland became a poster child of another sort: for what was by then being called “illiberal democracy,” in contrast to liberal democracy. After the Cold War, the highly influential American political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared the ideological battles had ended. This was “not just … the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such.” Illiberal democracy in Poland eschews the “liberal” part — meaning certain individual freedoms, like marriage equality or abortion rights — in favor of enforcing more traditional cultural norms, often drawn from religion, in this case, the Catholic Church.
Is “illiberal” democracy still democracy? The question is being debated by political scientists. Such regimes have often been accompanied by democratic backsliding. In Poland, the right-wing Law and Justice Party, as well as its main adversary, the liberal Civic Platform Party, were both part of the dissident movement that freed Poland from communism in the 1980s. But the two sides went separate ways. Civic Platform became internationalist and socially progressive, while Law and Justice promoted the values of the Catholic Church and nationalism. They appealed to voters outside urban areas whose lives had also been drastically improved by the economic boom, but who often felt excluded, or condescended to, by a new culture that looked outward — to the European Union, to foreign investors, to the trends of the West. The conservative forces in Poland seemed to ask what was wrong with the way things had always been done?
Like many of its allies in other countries, Law and Justice presented its political opponents not just as adversaries, but as a threat to the continued existence of the nation. When one views their opponents as enemies who are destroying morality, family, Christianity, seemingly everything that forms European civilization, then all manner of action in wielding and holding onto power becomes justified.
And that is what happened, as the Law and Justice Party worked to tighten its grip during its eight years in power, 2015-2023. Yet many of the processes that might fall under the banner of democratic backsliding are opaque, complicated, and highly technical.
Agata Szymanska-Medina’s photos allow us to see the emotion of each of these stories, and to see them as the personal stories that they are. For example, Igor Tuleya is the judge who presided over a legal case in 2016 in which Law and Justice was accused of violating procedures on a vote in parliament in order to pass important legislation. Tuleya ruled against the government, and, subsequently, the National Prosecutor’s office, which was headed by one of the most zealously ambitious Law and Justice politicians, accused Tuleya of violating the law by allowing the hearing to take place in public and in the presence of the media. Tuleya was suspended from office, and the National Prosecutor’s office wanted to detain him while they investigated whether he’d committed an offense that could result in a two-year prison sentence. Szymanska-Medina’s series on Tuleya transforms the complex minutiae of the case into a portrait of a diminutive, serious man harassed by the state and wrongfully removed from his position for refusing to play along with the violations of the ruling power.
This is one example of how the Law and Justice party stormed through the Polish judiciary, replacing judges by the hundreds, and rearranging the authority structures within the institutions so that the party would have more control over the outcomes.
Observers elsewhere, particularly in the U.S., will recognize the modus operandi of a political party that wants to change its country quickly and lastingly by way of the courts. Other political fights that have happened in Poland will also resonate: battles over public education and what to teach our children about our national history, efforts to discredit the media and control the public narrative, in short, a power struggle over who gets to define “the nation.”
When we talk about the “decline of democracy” today, we are not witnessing a repeat of the 1930s, or the 1840s, but something decidedly of the 21st century. It demands our precise attention and understanding, lest we find ourselves living in societies that are not the kind of societies we want to live in.
Elisabeth Zerofsky is a journalist and contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. She is currently working on a book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about the onset of illiberal democracy in Europe and the United States. She has reported extensively from France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary, the Balkans, the Baltic states, and across the US, with a special focus on central Europe and the American New Right. She lives in Berlin.
Samson Otieno | Jit Chattopadhyay | Hannah Reyes Morales | Fred Ramos | Agata Szymanska-Medina
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