So How Do We Save Democracy?

A little more than a year ago, in the fall of 2023, Poland held parliamentary elections. Activists and civil society leaders described them as the most important since 1989, Poland’s first vote after the end of communism, because they saw this as the country’s last chance to save its democracy. 

The right-wing Law and Justice Party (PiS) had been in power for eight years, and in that time, had undermined institutional safeguards and the rule of the law, remaking the judiciary and constitutional courts while consolidating control over the media. These elections were free, but not exactly fair – the government had every advantage, but the electoral process still functioned. However, many felt if PiS returned to power, that advantage would become insurmountable. There might not be a next time.

A few days before Poland voted, I spoke to Marta Lempart, the leader of Strajk Kobiet, or Women’s Strike, a pro-abortion group, in her office in Warsaw. In 2020, PiS passed a near-total ban on abortion, and Lempart and her allies led popular protests against it, helping to reshape public opinion in the largely Catholic country. Lempart’s Women Strike was one pillar in the big-tent opposition challenging PiS, but she was frustrated with some of the messaging. Voters, especially young people, were deeply disillusioned with the political establishment. Lempart said rather than addressing those concerns, politicians offered them an ultimatum instead: save democracy, or else. 

“We’re saying ‘it’s absolutely okay if you don’t feel anything, when you see the flag, when you hear the anthem, if you don’t care what happens, [if] the call to save the country just doesn’t appeal to you,” Lempart told me last October of how she was speaking to voters. But the reality was that they needed 50 percent plus one in parliament to change the abortion laws. “If you go and vote for abortion, believe that then we can deliver,” she said, of her message.

The centrist coalition did come to power in Poland, an alliance of leftist and centrist parties that together denied PiS its majority. Maybe the pro-democracy messaging worked, or maybe, like everywhere else in the world this past year, people were furious with the status quo: inflation was high, a war was raging across the border. Maybe people wanted change, and the option on offer was also the one that vowed to restore Polish democracy.

Lempart’s comments stuck with me because it felt prescient, a warning of sorts. So many elections in recent years have been fought on this idea of protecting or restoring democracy – one candidate or party were the normies, the others were authoritarians-in-waiting, and this election might be the last chance to kick them out, or to keep them from power. This was true in 2020 in the United States, in 2022, in places like France and Brazil, in 2023, in places like Turkey, and Thailand, and yes, in Poland, as well as in 2024, when about half the world voted, in India, Senegal, in France again, in some German states, and of course, in the United States. 

Democracy didn’t always win, but in the places it did, it usually succeeded by cobbling together some version of a democratic front from across the political spectrum. Joe Biden’s anti-MAGA coalition in 2020, and the one that showed up in 2022 midterms, were versions of this: from Never Trump Republicans to progressive activists, united at least for the moment. In Brazil, in 2022, leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) picked a conservative and former political rival as his running mate in an effort to build a broad consensus against Jair Bolsonaro and he narrowly succeeded.  In French parliamentary elections this summer, despite some wishy-washiness from Emmanuel Macron, left-wingers and centrists declined to challenge each other in the final round of voting, and urged the French public to vote tactically against the far-right. It created a fractured mess, but it pushed Marine Le Pen’s National Rally to third. 

These “democratic fronts” exist in opposition to the illiberal forces, and the voters who join them do so with an understanding that they may have to compromise some of their ideological beliefs or material needs to protect shared values, the rule of law, and the institutions that are otherwise under attack. It doesn’t even have to be that lofty: maybe it’s just the lesser of two evils, if one of the evils is a tiny bit more fascist than the other.

But a time limit is implicit in that contract. This is an ad hoc marriage, not a permanent one. We’ve just got to beat these guys. Once we do, we can go back to normal politics, argue about taxes and guns and entitlements, but at least exist in the same ballpark when it comes to the facts and some unspecified boundaries of acceptability. This “return to normalcy” was the promise of 2020 Joe Biden, after a pandemic and four years of Trump chaos.

That is not inherently a bad deal – if it worked. But it hasn’t worked. This vision of “normalcy” never returned, and it was probably never going to. Not in the United States, and maybe not in other places, too. 

Electoral victories have failed to fully remove these reactionary, populist, far-right forces from the body politic, and the democratic coalitions built to counter them are not necessarily built to address the frustration and dissatisfaction that gave rise to those forces in the first place. And these movements are fragile, because even if they have a positive policy platform – pro-abortion rights, or pro-climate action, or pro-worker’s rights – they must do the democratic thing and moderate and compromise and risk some coalitional attrition in the process. So the threats to democracy lose elections, but they keep hanging around. Which means there will always be one more do-or-die, last-chance-for-democracy vote.

If voters are meant to believe that every election is existential, then maybe none of them are. 

No one reason exists for why Kamala Harris lost and Donald Trump won. Harris probably wasn’t wrong to frame Trump as a threat to democracy, or to try to cobble together a 2024 version of the anti-MAGA coalition to beat back that threat. But voters had four years to test-run this protecting democracy thing, and the country ended up in the exact same place. Many Americans still saw the system as broken, compounded by broad frustrations around the state of the economy. 

A good share of this coalition still calculated that Harris was better than the alternative; a vote for her was a vote for a faulty democracy versus who honestly even knows at this point. But just enough of that front fell away. Some likely saw Harris as the wrong steward for democracy preservation, most notably around the Biden administration’s policies in Gaza and the Middle East. Some probably didn’t feel invested in saving a system that wasn’t working. Some likely just wanted change; some really were pissed about the price of eggs. Some maybe really did come around to Trump, while some probably felt he was the lesser of two evils. Maybe some just wanted to roll the dice. America saved democracy before, and where did it get us?

And yes, it can be worse. America is going to need to reconstitute another version of this anti-MAGA, democratic front among an exhausted constituency. Maybe Trump in office for a few months will do some of the job of rebuilding that coalition.

That might be enough for electoral success, but it’s just a reprieve. This is why Lempart’s comments rung true. To make the democratic front permanent, you’ve got to deliver, but you’re never going to deliver on salvaging or restoring the ideal democratic system that never existed in the first place. Instead, you’ve got to show how you can get the system to work, even a little bit. The case for saving democracy should be that it will be a lot easier to fix if it’s still intact. But then you need the platform on how you’re going to start fixing it. 

Poland is a pretty good example why. The centrist coalition promised to restore democracy, which meant they had to untangle and unravel the illiberalism of the past government. The PiS government stacked the courts with loyalists, and those judges, still there, are barriers to reforming the judiciary. That has made the process slow, and painstaking, which made another option attractive: take a sledgehammer to the judiciary system, and get rid of the loyalist judges, and build it back up from scratch. Except that is not particularly democratic, either. 

And, a year later, Poland still has its strict abortion laws on the books. The opposition had the majority, but it needed to rely on some more conservative parties for success, and those narrowly blocked the efforts to restore abortion rights. 

Lempart and other abortion activists were recently acquitted on charges tied to organizing pro-abortion protests in the wake of Poland’s restrictive laws. After the decision, Lempart said in a statement that she should be happy that she is not going to prison, but it was difficult to feel that way. “I am standing here, and I am asking this wonderful new government, where is abortion? And the politicians who came to power on our bruised backs, at the cost of our stress, our health, our sacrifices, pretend not to hear us,” she said. “They pretend not to know that we continue to be prosecuted for the protests that helped them win the elections.”

“I think they are counting on us finally getting tired,” she continued. “They are wrong – we were not stopped by [PiS leader Jaroslaw] Kaczynski, we will not be stopped by the pseudo-democrats.” This was in October, about a month before the U.S. voted. Another prescient warning for those claiming to defend democracy, realized in America maybe a bit too late.