Obama: Poland and Hungary are now “essentially authoritarian”

Poland and Hungary are now “authoritarian”, says Barack Obama, who cited the two countries as warnings to Americans of how “democracy can die at the ballot box”. In response, the Polish government has accused him of “lacking knowledge” about the situation in the country and invited him to visit.

In an interview for CNN, Obama told Anderson Cooper that “all of us as citizens have to recognise that the path towards an undemocratic America is not going to happen in just one day; it happens in a series of steps”.

“And when you look at what’s happened in places like Hungary and in Poland – that obviously did not have the same democratic traditions that we did, they weren’t as deeply rooted – and yet, as recently as ten years ago were functioning democracies, and now essentially have become authoritarian,” he continued.

Under their current populist national-conservative governments, both Poland and Hungary have declined dramatically in international rankings of democracy. They are accused of violating the rule of law, undermining judicial independence and seeking to bring the media under greater government control.

In its latest Nations in Transit report, Freedom House found that Poland has recorded the biggest decline in democracy over five years among 29 countries in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Hungary was in second place. The US-based NGO no longer classifies either country as a full democracy.

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), which produces the largest global dataset on democracy, earlier this year identified Poland as the world’s “most autocratising country” of the last decade, followed again by Hungary.

In 2019, in the Index of Economic Freedom compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative US think tank, Poland fell to 46th position, down from 39th in 2016. In the libertarian Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index, it fell from a high of 21st in 2011 to 40th.

Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, however, claims that such rankings are produced by organisations that do not understand the situation in Poland. It argues that the overhaul of the judiciary, media and other institutions was a necessary step to remove “post-communist elites”, who were themselves anti-democratic.

However, opinion polls show that a majority of Poles regard PiS’s reforms as an attempt to violate the rule of law. A recent international study found that Poland has the world’s largest “democratic deficit”: the gap between the proportion who think democracy is important (86%) and those who believe their country is democratic (31%, down from 39% in 2019).

In response to Obama’s remarks, Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, invited the former president to visit Poland rather than “reading studies that falsify the image of Poland”. Then he would see that it is actually “developing beautifully under PiS’s rule”.

“A lack of knowledge often leads to false reflections,” added deputy foreign minister Szymon Szynkowski vel Sęk, quoted by TVP Info. He noted that, whereas Obama had claimed democracy was not deeply rooted in Poland, the country actually has a “centuries-old traditions of democracy” (including one of the first modern constitutions).

But Tomasz Siemoniak, a deputy leader of Poland’s largest opposition party, Civic Platform (PO), said that Obama’s words are a “serious warning against the weakening of the alliance between Poland and the USA”.

Another opposition MP, Kamila Gasiuk-Pihowicz, noted that – in contrast to his words now – when Obama visited Warsaw in 2014, at a time when PO was in power, he had praised “Poland’s progress” and the “strength of [its] democracy”.

Main image credit: Tim D. Godbee/US Secretary of Defence (under CC BY 2.0)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.