Protests in the Middle East show the centrality of Palestine.
Demonstrations of solidarity with Palestinians have broken out across the Arab world this week, as Israel reels from Hamas’s massive attack and Palestinians in Gaza come under bombardment.
Moroccans, Jordanians, and Egyptians have rallied in protests large and small, even as the governments of these countries have built and maintained varying degrees of diplomatic ties with Israel. And while those demonstrations may seem jarring given the widespread deaths in Israel this week, the fact that some have cheered on violence against civilians may obscure the broader political dynamics at play — both within the Middle East and within the Arab countries themselves.
Hamas’s violence does not reflect the desire of all, or even most, Palestinians who seek rights and freedoms. But the solidarity expressed in these rallies reflects a broader dissatisfaction with how Israel, with Western support, has subjected Palestinians to military occupation since 1967. The protests also represent a rare space for political expression in largely autocratic states where regimes severely limit such speech.
In the Arab world, people have been as quick to show support for Palestine as most American politicians have for Israel. On Friday, after prayers at Egypt’s al-Azhar Mosque, protesters filled the streets. As did tens of thousands of Iraqis in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, thousands of Jordanians protesting in the capital and in major cities, and hundreds who gathered outside a central mosque in Qatar, along with protesters in Lebanon, Oman, Tunisia, and Yemen. Demonstrators burned Israeli flags and chanted against Israel’s military campaign.
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Without understanding the full history of the conflict and the region, some American readers could dismiss everyone participating in these protests as “angry Arabs,” a repugnant trope that has permeated Western media for a century and was heightened after 9/11. It may still be jarring to watch for many, but the forces that drive the protests go deep — and will only deepen as the latest war unfolds.
Why Palestine galvanizes the Arab world
For Palestinians and Arabs, the war did not begin on the morning of October 7 with Hamas’s attacks on Israel. Rather, for them, the war has been ongoing since 1948, when militias expelled Palestinians from their homes and killed tens of thousands in what is called the Nakba, or catastrophe. It continued with the 1967 setback — as the Six-Day War is called in Arabic — in which Israel began occupying the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and has carried on through waves of further conflicts and protests.
That support is rooted in a history of grassroots support for Palestinians and of Arab strongmen using the cause as a populist rallying point. “It’s the open wound, the festering sore, on the Arab conscience,” Mouin Rabbani, an analyst of Palestinian politics and co-editor of the web journal Jadaliyya, told me. “When you go back to the 1950s and the 1960s, the heyday of Arab nationalism, Palestine was the central Arab cause, so much so that many Arab leaders could use it, instrumentalize it, and exploit it to either help them achieve power or stay in power or improve their popularity at home.”
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The religious component is also important, with so many holy sites for Muslims within Jerusalem and throughout Israel and the occupied territories. The Arab-Israeli conflict is a political conflict over land, and it has never been primarily a religious war. (For centuries, Jews and Muslims had gotten along throughout the Middle East and beyond.) Yet images of Israeli security forces in mosques of significant historic meaning can indeed galvanize emotional response. And the same goes for churches in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, among other holy sites for Arab Christians.
Nonetheless, most Arabs, according to polling conducted over two decades by the Arab Barometer, would be willing to have diplomatic relations with Israel — but only after the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. “They’re not against coexisting with a Jewish-majority Israeli state, which is what exists now, but they will not do that until the Palestinians get their rights,” Rami Khouri, a Palestinian-Jordanian journalist and a policy fellow at the American University of Beirut, told me.
“The popular sentiment across the whole region supporting Palestinian rights is very strong and very deep,” Khouri told me.
“Most Arab citizens are bludgeoned by their own autocratic systems, and increasingly by severe economic stress,” he explained. “So the Palestine struggle is vicariously seen by many in the region as an anti-colonial struggle.”
As long as both Arab rulers and their populations remained united in the idea that there could be no progress with Israel without significant progress in the Palestinian cause, normalization of Israel’s ties with its Middle East neighbors — long a goal of politicians there and in the US — was off the table. But in recent years, that had begun to change.
Where Arab rulers and citizens diverge
Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979, and neighboring Jordan followed in 1993. Such deals were often far from popular at home — Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by Islamic militants who were against the peace deal. Other Arab states held out, insisting first on the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. US policy since President George H.W. Bush has been focused on a peace process that would lead to that outcome, and the goal as set out by Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama was two states for two peoples.
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When President Donald Trump focused on a series of normalization deals between Israel and Arab states in 2020, however, he sidelined the cause of Palestine. Saudi Arabia, which had long emphasized the importance of a Palestinian state, had already been quietly developing extensive business and military relationships with Israel. Suddenly it seemed possible that the Palestinian cause could be sacrificed by the Arab world’s rulers.
But all of the countries involved in the normalization negotiations — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco — are autocracies. And their citizens were not as eager to go along with a new Middle East. In response, the governments of these countries censored criticism of the deals in the press and stifled public protests. “Activists who were involved in pro-Palestine activism — either through local organizations or through the Gulf Coalition Against Normalization — also reported worsening online harassment, forcing many to take a step back from their activities,” Dana El Kurd, a political scientist at the University of Richmond, writes.
Surveys show how unpopular those accords were. Recent polls show their Arab support has dropped significantly since 2020, with just 27 percent of Emiratis and 20 percent of Bahrainis in favor of the accords.
“If you had democracy in the Arab world, you wouldn’t have any normalization,” historian Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University told me. “Public opinion is overwhelmingly against normalization with Israel. Overwhelmingly, in every poll in every country.”
The past few days have seen renewed calls for boycotting of Israeli-linked businesses in Bahrain and Qatar, and a resurgence of anti-normalization activism in Gulf countries, El Kurd told me. Far from being relegated to the backburner, the Palestinian cause is now front and center in the Arab world. And that is something American policymakers can’t afford to ignore.
Where the US goes from here in the Middle East
Palestine is so central to the Arab Middle East that even US military leaders historically understood the peril of ignoring the Palestinian cause.
When David Petraeus, then the top US military commander in the Middle East, went before the Senate in 2010, he warned that the unresolved Israel-Palestinian conflict was endangering American lives.
“The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests,” he testified. “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of US favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR [area of responsibility] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.”
But President Biden’s policies have not recognized the centrality of Palestine in the region. Instead, Biden spent last year repairing relations with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and prioritized a diplomatic deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel that now appears dead on arrival.
Biden told the United Nations last month that his team is working “tirelessly to support a just and lasting peace between the Israelis and Palestinians — two states for two people.” But in reality, the administration’s empty commitment to the two-state solution has precluded the development of actual policies that would lead to peace.
Where does that leave a US policy focused on normalization in a region that largely cares more about Palestinians?
The governments of Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates are balancing their relations with Israel and their people’s solidarity with Palestine. The Bahraini foreign ministry “stressed the need to immediately stop the ongoing fighting between the Palestinian Hamas movement and the Israeli forces.” Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita, in remarks to a session of the Arab League, acknowledged the “bloody and horrifying events that erupted on Saturday, October 7, 2023” and an Arab League resolution urged restraint, warning of “catastrophic repercussions, both human and security, of the continuation and expansion of the escalation.” The Emirati Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that it “deeply mourns the loss of Israeli and Palestinian lives” and “stressed that attacks by Hamas against Israeli towns and villages near the Gaza Strip, including the firing of thousands of rockets at population centers, are a serious and grave escalation.”
It would seem unlikely that those countries would break off or downgrade their diplomatic relations with Israel. What seems certain is that more Arab countries are not likely to normalize with Israel. The ongoing bombardment of Gaza, and a ground assault if one goes ahead, will undermine those prospects further.
“In the short term, the normalization deal with Saudi Arabia is going to be delayed or face some level of obstacle,” El Kurd told me. “Because the whole point of them engaging on this topic is to say, ‘Oh, we’re going to meaningfully change Palestinian living conditions.’ I don’t think that’s within their ability to change, even marginally, at this point.”
Now, one hopes that Biden’s advisers are watching protests in Arab capitals with a new understanding of the significance of Palestine to any Middle East policy. An approach to the region that does not take into account the mass, popular support for Palestinian rights — as has been on display since Biden took office — is not suited to reckon with realities on the ground. By focusing on solidifying Israel’s ties to Arab leaders, Biden has neglected to listen to Arab people.
The high stakes of Poland’s elections, explained.
WARSAW, Poland — “We have been talking that these are the most important elections since 1989, which was the first partly free elections since the fall of communism,” Jakub Kocjan, a rule of law campaigner for Akcja Demokracja, a Polish pro-democracy organization, told me from his apartment in Warsaw, less than a week before parliamentary elections that may determine the democratic future of Poland.
Behind him, a map of the European Union spans the wall. Another map, this one of Poland, hangs on the other side of the room. Kocjan sits in a desk chair, one leg extended and propped up on a bed. His foot is in a plastic boot, an old injury flaring up.
“There is some point,” Kocjan says, “where there is no possibility to go back to democracy.”
For Kocjan, and for many other civic and pro-democracy activists, opposition party members, and some observers, this October 15 election is that point.
Poland’s democracy is wounded, the consequence of eight years of rule by the right-wing populist Law and Justice Party (PiS). The party has captured state institutions and resources, dismantled the judicial system and constitutional courts, consolidated control over public media. The party has mainstreamed nationalism, which has put Poland at odds with the European Union and its members, like Germany and with other partners, most recently, Ukraine.
The stakes of the election are undeniable: If PiS wins again and returns to power, it will keep Poland on this illiberal path: more undermining of the rule of law and the judiciary; more domination over the media and the state resources; more tension with European partners. Which is why these elections feel to many like the most important vote in more than 30 years.
“This time, many people are expecting the same — but more. Stronger, with the Hungarian path actually becoming a reality,” said Piotr Łukasiewicz, a former Polish diplomat and analyst for security and international affairs with Polityka Insight, referring to Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian consolidation in Hungary.
Yet Poland is divided, and right now the elections are a bit too close to call — and that means, despite the odds, the democratic opposition has a chance to unseat PiS. PiS’s control of the media and state resources has skewed competition, but it has not eliminated it. Broad public frustration over the high cost of living has eaten away at PiS’s support, along with the rise of a more radical far-right party, the Confederation that has questioned Poland’s support for Ukraine, and is appealing to younger voters, especially men.
The opposition centrist Civic Coalition, led by former Prime Minister Donald Tusk, is promising to restore Poland’s democracy and improve relations with Europe. Civic and an array of other opposition coalitions on the left, center, and center-right, are pulling close in polls. It is a catch-all, diverse group, but together they may be able to get PiS out of power and try to begin unraveling the illiberal regime it created.
None of this is a guarantee. PiS seems unlikely to win an outright majority, but it very much could still garner the most votes, enough to form a government, even if they have to seek the help of the more right-wing Confederation. Even if the opposition coalitions win enough seats to potentially form a government, it is likely to be a slim edge, under a very broad tent, and reliant on cooperation from many disparate groups, which may weaken its effectiveness. No matter who emerges, this parliamentary election could make Polish politics a lot more unstable. That may dislodge PiS for now, but make unpredictable what could replace it.
These election results also matter for more than just Poland. They will reverberate across Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO). Poland is Europe’s front line in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a critical transfer point for arms, and a host of more than 1 million Ukrainian refugees. The future of Poland’s democracy may influence regional stability and its future support of Ukraine; PiS has picked fights with Kyiv, in part, to fend off the rise of the far right, and if PiS retains power, those tensions may persist, another nick in an increasingly fragile Western coalition as the war moves closer to its third year.
Poland is not alone in being framed as a last-chance election: Recent votes in Brazil, Turkey, and soon the United States and India, all carry similar stakes. One election isn’t enough to unmake polarization or fully fix a faltering democracy, but it may be the first step to healing the break. This is Poland’s test: not just whether it can save its own democracy, but whether it can be a model for Europe and the world that it’s even possible.
“There are two feelings that everyone has,” Kocjan told Vox. “First is a lot of hope because we really know that we have this chance, and we cannot waste it. Because it will be too late.”
The other, he said, was anxiety that even if the opposition won enough votes, it would be able to take control. “It is really hard to imagine,” he said, referring to PiS, “that they will simply give the power to the other party.”
How do you win an election you’re rigged to lose?
Warsaw, Poland’s capital and biggest city, is largely an opposition town. The campaign signs at bus stops or on street signs skew toward the opposition, Koalicja Obywatelska (KO), or the Civic Coalition. On Nowy Świat, a main thoroughfare in Warsaw’s Old Town — the part of the city reconstructed after World War II to look like it did before it was destroyed — many voters criticized the direction of the country, the state of education, health care, and democracy. “I really want to change what’s been there so far,” one Warsaw resident told Vox. “My whole heart is with the Civic Coalition, with the opposition party.”
Elsewhere, near the Wileński (Vilnius) metro station in the North Praga, an area by the Warsaw district that had the most PiS support in the last parliamentary election in 2019, not everyone seemed eager to vote for PiS again. A woman sitting at a stand selling socks said she’d had enough and would definitely not vote for Jarosław Kaczyński, the deputy prime minister and leader of the PiS party. She recently had to buy medicine. It cost too much for her, and yet, she saw plenty of people getting benefits who didn’t work for them.
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Jen Kirby/Vox
It reflected some of the fatigue around PiS. The right-wing party is socially conservative, but a lot of its popularity was built on its populist economic policies, which included generous welfare benefits like a child subsidy. PiS oversaw a period of growth, which they can’t take exclusive credit for, but their policies did benefit lower-income households, and so PiS became the party most trusted on economic issues.
But the economic aftershocks of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine have raised Poland’s inflation to some of the highest in Europe and that has refracted onto PiS. PiS was popular as long as Poles felt things were improving, but now with the costs rising, support for PiS is flagging.
That did not necessarily translate to support for the Civic Coalition in this neighborhood though; one man said he’d take the current government over the opposition, but he’d prefer to clear them all out. Another woman said she wouldn’t vote because she didn’t like anyone.
Some of this disillusionment is because, as high as the stakes of the election, voters are mostly dealing with the same cast of characters (if that sounds familiar). Civic’s leader, Tusk, was the Polish prime minister from 2007 and 2014 and is the former president of the European Council — that is, a guy who’s been around for a long time. “The Civic Coalition doesn’t look like a new offer,” explained Edwin Bendyk, chairman of the Fundacja im. Stefana Batorego, a pro-democracy organization, of some of the public’s hesitation around the party. Plus, media propaganda doesn’t help. Poland’s public media has relentlessly attacked Tusk, framing him as a European bureaucrat who is an agent of Germany, but also an appeaser of Russia. On Warsaw’s streets, residents repeated some of these attacks.
Still, it all felt fairly typical for a week ahead of a major election: the motivated, the undecided, the disillusioned, the indifferent. This is the trickiness of an illiberal democracy. It isn’t a fully authoritarian state where elections are a farce. The PiS has chipped away at the rule of law and democracy but not destroyed it entirely, and the beats of the electoral system are intact. The outcome of the vote is still uncertain, though exactly how uncertain is hard to know because it’s difficult to quantify exactly how far the scales have been tipped.
“The election will be free. It’s not fair because of the advantages that the government has. But it’s still more or less a functioning democracy,” said Adam Traczyk, director of More in Common Polska, a pro-democracy think tank.
The PiS party was legitimately elected in 2015, and since then has used the levers of power to capture the state and its institutions. PiS has subverted the constitutional and judicial system. PiS painted judges as post-communist holdovers, acting against the people’s interests — in part because they had previously thwarted some of PiS’s legislation and agenda, and they, after all, PiS had a democratic mandate. Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal is stacked with PiS loyalists and is now neutered to the point of dysfunction.
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In this, and other ways, PiS has fully captured the state, subverting it to its own political interests. This election has shown just how tilted things are. PiS has turned public media into state propaganda that relentlessly attacks the opposition. In this campaign, PiS has raised funds from state-controlled entities and its employees. A state-controlled oil and gas company owns a press company that publishes almost 20 regional newspapers and hundreds of weeklies and online sites; they refused to publish ads for certain candidates because of their “left-wing” values. The PiS party has approved benefit and pension hikes ahead of this campaign.
As a nationalistic party, PiS has also tried to hype up its base by fear-mongering around immigration, especially from the Middle East and Africa (though PiS itself was embroiled in a cash-for-visa scheme), and a meddlesome Europe that is trying to interfere in Poland. To motivate their supporters, PiS is staging a referendum it has little power to implement, with loaded questions like: Do you support “the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, according to the forced relocation mechanism imposed by the European bureaucracy?”
PiS has also tweaked electoral rules, increasing polling stations in rural areas, places most likely to benefit PiS. It is likely PiS strongholds are already overrepresented since the country hasn’t updated its parliamentary count to adjust for potential population changes, and some estimates suggest cities — where the opposition tends to do well — are underrepresented. Right now, a record number of Poles — some 600,000 — have registered to vote abroad. Those will most likely favor the opposition, but they must be counted within 24 hours or they are disqualified, a rule PiS passed in January that notably does not apply to the rest of Poland’s votes.
These baked-in disadvantages are why the opposition faces steep odds, and it explains some of the desperation they feel. “For the opposition, this is seen pretty widely as an election that if they don’t win this one they might not be able to win another one, that the systemic advantage of the government would be so strong,” said Michal Baranowski, managing director for the German Marshall Fund East, in Warsaw.
Tusk and the opposition have framed this election as the last chance to save Poland’s democracy. Jakub (Kuba) Karyś, chair of Komitet Obrony Demokracji (Committee to Protect Democracy), said he believed if the opposition did not win these elections, they would be the last ones.
“Having this government for the third time would be a disaster because they will continue to close up this authoritarian system,” Bendyk said. Poland was not authoritarian yet; there was still a free press, strong civil society, and thriving local democracy which Bendyk described as the immune system in the democratic resistance. But one by one, PiS would target these. “It’s quite easy to lay down rules to demand you can be penalized for different actions,” Bendyk said. “It can be difficult to do what we are doing now.”
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In her office in Warsaw, Marta Lempart, leader of Strajk Kobiet, or Women’s Strike, a women’s rights and pro-abortion-rights group, was preparing to film videos to respond to different election outcomes. She has campaigned against PiS’s strict abortion laws. I asked how the organization’s work would change if PiS won again. “When they close the system,” Lempart replied, “our operations will be different because I will be in jail, obviously.”
Can the opposition actually win?
The opposition has an incentive to hype the stakes and make this election existential. But most experts and other observers Vox spoke to agreed that Poland would continue on this anti-democratic path if PiS captured power again.
And, right now, the opposition does have a real, if tenuous, opening.
The cost of living concerns of the electorate are real. Beyond that, PiS is facing a challenge from its right, the radical, anti-establishment party Konfederancja, or Confederation. The group doesn’t really fit into neat boxes; it’s a wild mess of libertarians, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, antisemites, and incels. Confederation also has a strong anti-Ukraine strain, reviving historical grievances, criticizing the war and Poland’s support for it, and Warsaw’s welcome of Ukrainian refugees.
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Broadly, Poles are still supportive of Ukraine and of Warsaw’s political and humanitarian response to Russia’s invasion, and Russia is too big of a security threat for a real pro-Russia party to thrive. But Confederation’s anti-establishment message is peeling off some disillusioned voters, especially from younger demographics. That has freaked out PiS enough that it has hardened its stance on Ukraine, an uncomfortable development for the Western alliance given Poland’s position on NATO’s eastern flank.
Together, though, PiS looks somewhat vulnerable. So the pro-democracy opposition is mobilizing. In early October, hundreds of thousands of opposition supporters attended a massive rally in Warsaw. Karyś, of the Committee to Protect Democracy, said his group has registered more than 27,000 volunteers so far to observe the polls.
The democratic opposition — both parties running and pro-democracy activists and civil society leaders — is a diverse group. They are unified to dislodge PiS, which gives the vote a bit of the feel of the 2020 US election: anti-Trump more than pro-Biden; anti-PiS more than pro-Tusk and pro-Civic. Kocjan, the rule of law campaigner, said people are trying to vote strategically; that is, if they live in a more conservative district, voting for the opposition party most likely to win, not necessarily the one they favor the most.
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In 2020, PiS oversaw a near-total ban on legal abortion, one of the most extreme in Europe. Lempart, leader of Strajk Kobiet, is trying to motivate voters on the abortion issue, especially younger voters, ages 18 to 25, to convince them they can get enough pro-abortion MPs elected, they can dismantle these restrictions.
She noted that many young voters are disillusioned with the current political establishment — something backed up by surveys — but the opposition wasn’t offering a positive message, just criticizing young people, telling them to vote and save the country or else.
Her organization’s approach was to give voters a clear deliverable. “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,” she said. But the Parliament needs 50 percent plus one to change the abortion laws. “If you go and vote for abortion, believe that then we can deliver,” Lempart said.
Can Poland reverse its illiberal path?
The radical far-right Confederation may end up the decider on Poland’s democratic future. PiS is still likely to win the most seats in parliament, though it seems unlikely to secure an outright majority. It may have to look to its rivals in the Confederation. The Confederation hates PiS because of its welfare spending; going into government with them would probably destroy their anti-establishment credentials. Still, PiS might just need to persuade a few opportunistic politicians to switch sides.
And even if the opposition can pull it out, the path forward is likely turbulent and tricky. One wild and risky possibility is the far-right Confederation tolerating a minority government led by the Civic Coalition. And no matter what, PiS is unlikely to go quietly. Their allies are in the courts, including the ones that deal with elections. Their allies control the business interests. Their allies control the messages on public media.
“If the opposition really manages to win or has enough votes to form a coalition, it’s not that on the 16th of October, we will all be sitting and singing Kumbaya and everything will be fine,” said Maria Skóra, a researcher at the Institute for European Politics (IEP), in Berlin. “The thing is that Law and Justice will not give up their powers too easily.”
Which is why many activists, experts, and observers in Warsaw seemed to think the most likely outcome of this election is one of instability: a fragile, messy government that might not last very long. That instability still offers the chance of evicting PiS from some of the centers of power, but the consequences of that are just as uncertain. It might make it far more difficult to undertake any meaningful reforms, and the opposition in disarray could be replaced by an emboldened PiS or a radical right, maybe in snap elections next year.
Even if the opposition does take control, it is a prospect — but not a guarantee — of change. “We also realize that the democratic opposition parties are not angels,” Bendyk said. But, he added, “At least open the window for opportunity for changes.”
What that window looks like is hard to say because reversing an illiberal democracy hasn’t really been done. “You don’t have an example of a country where you had an illiberal regime, established over years, and then rolled back by a democratic, liberal government,” said Piotr Buras, head of the Warsaw office for the European Council on Foreign Relations. Because Poland isn’t a full-on authoritarian system, you can’t just start from scratch. If the opposition gets into power, it will be because it won an election, after all. “An illiberal regime, this is a different animal,” he added.
Experts and activists suggested the opposition might find some tasks easier than others: replacing people at the public media station, or disentangling some of the state-controlled businesses from the state. But for the judiciary and the courts, even experts are perplexed by some of the changes there. How to unravel that and restore rule of law will be a complicated, and maybe even doomed process. On top of that, Poland’s PiS-aligned president, Andrzej Duda, will be in power until at least 2025. He can veto legislation, which a divided Parliament probably won’t have the votes to override.
“It’s the question,” Tracyzk said. “Do you want to do it quickly? Or create possibly even more chaos risking that every four years there will be chaos once again? Or do you want to try to do it kind of in a more democratic stable manner, knowing that it will take more time, knowing that you will not be able to fix all the things that quickly?”
The very high stakes of Poland’s election — for the country and the world
Yet Poland, if it has the chance, has to try. These elections are critical for global democracy but also for Europe and the rest of the world. The PiS party has challenged Europe and the supremacy of its rule of law, a perpetual and persistent problem from the bloc. PiS is picking fights with its neighbors, like Germany, at a time when Europe is trying to figure out its own future — on foreign policy, governance, and security. Tusk, a former European official, will almost certainly reset Polish relations with the EU, although he’ll be dealing with a long list at home.
But the war in Ukraine looms over all of it. After Russia’s full-scale invasion, Poland emerged as Ukraine’s ironclad supporter. Poland used this position to rally other EU countries, putting pressure on its partners, like Germany, to deliver tanks. It won some goodwill, including from the EU, and some saw it as a sign that Warsaw might become the new power center in Europe and of NATO.
That has since shifted. The Polish public remains broadly supportive of Ukraine and of hosting Ukrainian refugees, but inflation and inflammatory rhetoric, especially by the Confederation, has eroded some of that enthusiasm. As a result, the PiS party has turned Ukraine into an electoral issue, most notably with its dispute over Ukrainian grain.
Poland has said the transit of Ukranian grain into Europe is hurting undermining Polish farmers (who also happen to be an important voting bloc for PiS), and so it (along with some others) would defy a EU rule and continue banning Ukrainian grain imports. The spat culminated with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki saying last month that Poland was no longer giving weapons to Ukraine. This was a bit misleading; Poland continues to be a transfer point for international aid and weapons, but Poland itself is not sending more weapons, mostly because it has already given everything it has to give. But the damage was done.
“How can this Polish government go back and become an advocate again, and actually name and shame our bigger allies — Europeans, Americans, as well, to some extent — on sending more, or sending more advanced weapons?” Baranowski, of GMF, said. “We, as a country, just gave away a huge chunk of credibility that could have been used and was used successfully.”
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Janek Skarzynski/AFP via Getty Images
As experts said, Ukraine is not about to break with the Western alliance; it still sees Russia as too big of a threat and the war as critical to its security. But as the war enters something of a standstill, Poland’s domestic politics could spill over and further strain the Western alliance, which is already under pressure, especially as the United States now struggles to approve Ukraine aid. And if the PiS party must work with the Confederation to stay in power, Poland’s tensions with Ukraine may only grow deeper.
Although the PiS party has sold itself as the real protectors of Poland, if opposition wins they will continue support for Ukraine, and potentially offer a little relations reset. Beyond that, so much of the rhetoric around Ukraine support revolves around defending democracy — even as some of its supporters, like Poland, are not exactly living up to those values.
With Sunday’s election, Poland has the chance to rebuild its democracy, as it also defends the one next door. “Poland is the final buffer between the West and the East,” said Karyś. “It’s incredibly important for Europe and the world for it to be there.”
California wants to find out.
If you order a company to reveal how much it pollutes, would it clean up its act? And if a business has to chalk out all the ways extreme weather and rising sea levels hurt its bottom line, will that force it to better prepare?
California certainly thinks so. The Golden State recently enacted two climate laws. One would make billion-dollar businesses in the state — the likes of Apple, Google, Walmart, and Chevron, more than 5,300 companies in total — disclose their greenhouse gas emissions publicly. The second requires companies making more than $500 million a year, applying to more than 10,000 companies, to report their climate-related financial risks.
To limit climate change, simply getting a handle on where heat-trapping gasses are coming from is a critical step. And figuring out how rising average temperatures will hurt businesses could make the cost-benefit case for investing in more action on climate change right now.
That’s why several states, the US federal government, and some other countries have been exploring forms of climate change disclosure rules, reporting their tallies to independent monitoring groups. And many companies have already started publishing their numbers.
“Already today, issuers are making climate risk disclosures, and investors are making investment decisions based on those disclosures,” Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said at a Treasury Department meeting in July. “Further, investors representing tens of trillions of dollars in assets are making decisions relying on those disclosures.”
However, California’s latest laws go further than most other climate reporting requirements on the books in the US. In particular, the new greenhouse gas accounting law requires big companies to measure their scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions. These are the indirect emissions from an organization, including things like the carbon dioxide output from employees commuting to work, pollution from shipping, or the energy needed to power their products. A company’s scope 3 emissions can be more than 11 times greater than its direct emissions.
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Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images
By including this category, it expands the spotlight beyond major manufacturers and fossil fuel companies to envelop businesses that don’t often face scrutiny for their impact on the climate. Tech companies, financial firms, and retailers may not have smokestacks coming out of their data centers, office towers, and stores, but it can still take a lot of greenhouse gasses to keep their supply chains moving.
“It has changed the conversation for people who are sitting on the fence who are not the Exxons or the Chevrons — people who haven’t been pressured as much — to start thinking about these issues,” said Shivaram Rajgopal, a professor of accounting and auditing at the Columbia Business School.
For companies whose raw materials, warehouses, and operations sprawl across the world, calculating these numbers can quickly turn into an expensive ordeal. Accounting for the business impact of rising average temperatures is also tricky and costly since it requires an accurate estimate of where things stand and then simulating the knock-on effects of different climate change scenarios, like higher insurance premiums due to wildfire risk. In signing statements for both bills, California Gov. Gavin Newsom expressed concern about the financial pain the new rules could inflict and directed state regulators to monitor compliance costs.
But some major corporations have backed these measures, including REI, Adobe, Microsoft, and IKEA, companies that are already voluntarily reporting their emissions and climate risks. In an August letter, these companies said California’s new rules will help spur laggards to act and “ensure economy-wide accountability and action.”
The question, then, is how big an impact this will have.
California is one state out of 50, but it is the largest one and has the biggest economy so its rules can change the game across the country and the world. However, policies are fragmented across the states. While California is pushing businesses to do more on climate change, states like Texas and Florida are penalizing companies that are cutting back on investments in fossil fuels.
The new rules in California may also be too hasty, even for California. Gov. Newsom wrote that “the implementation deadlines in this [emissions disclosure] bill are likely infeasible, and the reporting protocol specified could result in inconsistent reporting across businesses subject to the measure.” The legislature and state regulators will therefore have to go back to revise their timelines and hammer out more details.
The SEC is now proposing to harmonize emissions reporting and risk disclosure rules across the country. But it has triggered a vast right-wing campaign against this initiative, with some business groups arguing that making companies publish their climate data violates the First Amendment. “Groups like the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, Americans for Prosperity, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute have flooded the SEC with comments that argue company free speech would be violated,” wrote Vox’s Rebecca Leber.
I recently co-lead a letter with @RepAdamSchiff and 24 members of the California Delegation urging @GaryGensler to ensure that large corporations must keep informing investors and the public about their environmental impact.
— Rep. Juan Vargas (@RepJuanVargas) October 12, 2023
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