The world should learn from Poland's tragedy: restoring democracy is even harder than creating it | Timothy Garton Ash

After eight years of populist chaos, Donald Tusk must rebuild trust in the state and resist the urge to simply turn the tables

Evolution or revolution?" The question being asked in Poland today captures the dilemma of trying to restore liberal democracy after eight years of populist state capture. Must one, for instance, break the letter of a specific law in order to restore the rule of law as an overall condition? The Polish experience will tell us something important about the future of democracy inside EU member states. It also prefigures a challenge the United States could face at the end of a second Donald Trump presidency.

The last few weeks in Polish politics have been dramatic, angry and sometimes bizarre. Two former ministers of the previously ruling Law and Justice (PiS) government, convicted of the falsification of documents while in public office, take refuge in the palace of the president, their party comrade Andrzej Duda. While Duda is away at another meeting, the police arrest them in the palace and carry them off to prison. The president says they are political prisoners", talks of rule of law terror", and even makes a comparison with Bereza Kartuska, a notorious concentration camp in 1930s Poland. PiS launches a protest demo in the snow, deploying the iconography of the Solidarity movement that led Poland to freedom in the 1980s. PiS leader Jarosaw Kaczyski says the arrested politicians are heroes who should be awarded the country's highest honours. Poland's genuinely tragic and inspiring past is recycled as grotesque parody.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist