Annual Copernicus Lecture. The Post-Populist Predicament: On Redemocratization and Rule-of-Law Restoration in Poland since 2023

On October 15, 2023, Polish voters elected, by a wide margin, a coalition of democratic parties and thus ended an 8-year episode of authoritarian-populist rule. But in contrast to other known cases of populist incumbents’ electoral defeat (Bolsonaro in Brazil, Janša in Slovenia, or Trump in the U.S. in 2020), the incumbents left a deeply dismantled institutional field, or rather a minefield of various legal and institutional ambushes meant to render re-democratization extremely difficult, if not impossible. In such circumstances, a post-populist government faces a fundamental tension between the aim of depolarization and that of democratic consolidation. The rule-of-law conundrum best illustrates the tension: to respect the rule of law as traditionally, conventionally understood—as dictating observance of all legal rules in force, whatever their intent or content—leads to paralysis in a new government’s re-democratization efforts.

Sadurski will offer an account of the post-populist predicament in Poland (not avoiding the question of whether it is truly post-populist) and sketch some proposed solutions to the conundrum. He will show how the post-populist transition is different, and in many ways more difficult, than the post-communist transition in the early 1990s, and how it necessitates some innovative constitutional remedies. He will then explore lessons that can be drawn from the Polish case for future redemocratization of other populist-authoritarian regimes, such as those in Turkey, India, or Hungary today.

Wojciech Sadurski is Challis Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Sydney and Professor at the University of Warsaw’s Center for Europe, as well as a lawyer, political philosopher, and commentator on public affairs. He previously held the chair in philosophy of law at the European University Institute in Florence and has taught regularly at Yale, NYU, and Princeton, as well as at universities in Europe and Asia. He is a member of the Global Rule of Law Commission. Sadurski’s most recent books include Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown (2019), A Pandemic of Populists (2022), and Constitutional Public Reason (2023). He is a co-recipient of the 2023 Karol Pilarczyk Foundation Award for the “promotion of democracy and the rule of law” by the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in America (PIASA).

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