Democratic backsliding in Turkey, Poland is a threat to all of NATO

Last month, President Biden declared at the second Summit for Democracy that “the democracies of the world are getting stronger, not weaker. Autocracies of the world are getting weaker, not stronger.”

This ambitious claim is supported by momentous developments over the past year, including Ukraine’s courageous defense of its own sovereign democracy (aided by a revitalized and growing NATO alliance) and last year’s protests for freedom and human rights in China and Iran.

However, this rosy optimism ignores the reality that this year’s two most important elections — in the critical NATO allies of Turkey and Poland — will be administered by regimes that maintain their grip on power through similar autocratic playbooks that result in severely unfair elections, which my coauthors and I explore in our report, “Autocrats Within.”

The electoral playing fields in Turkey in May and Poland in the fall will be tilted in favor of ruling regimes that have sharply curtailed judicial independence and media freedom in their countries. Both regimes also use their relationships with corrupt figures to exert informal influence aimed at ensuring that elections are pose minimal threats to their holds on power. The outcomes of both these elections and the fairness and freedom with which they are conducted will have major consequences for NATO, which is necessarily underpinned by shared democratic values and practices.

NATO requires new members to demonstrate the solvency of their democratic institutions but has no easy mechanism for suspending or expelling a current member that fails to meet those institutional thresholds. This makes the collapse of democracy within a NATO member a serious challenge to the alliance at large.

Turkey and Poland both serve as critical pieces of NATO’s security architecture. Turkey possesses the second largest ground force in the alliance and sits at a strategic crossroads, commanding the only entrance to the Black Sea, while sharing land borders with several adversarial and/or conflict-plagued states, including Syria, Iraq, Iran, Armenia and Georgia. Turkey has also provided drones to Ukraine to aid in its defense against Russia.

At the same time, Turkey has balanced its relationship with NATO with its relationship with Russia. This has included the purchase of the S-400 air defense system (which forced Turkey out of the U.S. F-35 program) and cooperation with Russian strategy in Syria and Libya. More recently, Turkish businesses have been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for exporting hardware with military applications to Russia, and leaked Pentagon documents reveal that Russia seeks to buy weapons and ammunition from Turkey, despite its membership in NATO. Turkey also objects to Sweden’s bid for NATO membership, which Russia also naturally strongly opposes.

Recent elections in Turkey have been deemed “free, but not fair” by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE); voters can make a genuine choice at the ballot box and outcomes are meaningful, it says, but elections are conducted in a highly biased environment in which public media, private media and industry all collaborate to tip the scales in favor of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP. In the upcoming election, Erdoğan faces his toughest challenge yet due to an abysmal economy (driven in part by the unorthodox monetary policy he has imposed on Turkey’s central bank), a catastrophic earthquake (made worse by years of the lax building code enforcement favored by his pet oligarchs in the construction industry), numerous government scandals and an unusually unified opposition.

His precarious position in the polls may push him to take even more drastic action, which could include using the earthquake as a pretext to make voting more difficult for some groups, falsifying the results, or bringing his supporters into the streets in the case of a contested outcome in a Turkish equivalent to the United States’s Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

If Erdogan takes any of these steps, Turkish elections will have become not only unfair but unfree, which would push Turkey from a “hybrid regime” to a “consolidated autocracy.” Such a collapse of democracy in Turkey would almost certainly push the country closer to Russia and would constitute a major problem for the NATO alliance at large.

Poland, too, has become an invaluable member of NATO, and unlike Ankara, Warsaw is unambiguous in its opposition to both Russian and Chinese imperialism. President Andrzej Duda has staunchly supported Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion, and Poland has welcomed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees and provided Ukraine with direct military equipment, including recently dispatching MiG-29 jet fighters to the country. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki drew Chinese ire for openly comparing the plight of Ukraine to that of Taiwan.

The Polish government’s impressive words and deeds when it comes to defending democracy abroad only make its attacks on democracy at home all the more tragic. Poland’s ruling party (the PiS), like the AKP in Turkey, has eviscerated the country’s independent judiciary, illegally replacing members of the Constitutional Tribunal with lackeys to ensure that its legislative agenda faces no scrutiny or resistance. This agenda has included laws barring foreign ownership of Polish media as part of a concerted effort to make private media an organ of the party, just as it has already done with public media.

And, like Erdogan’s regime, the PiS steers state resources and patronage into the hands of allies in exchange for financial and political support. Underpinning all of this is a nationalistic political platform that blames international institutions, immigrants, minorities and the LGBT community for problems faced by the Polish people — and frames the PiS as the only institution that can protect the country. As in the case of Turkey, a collapse of meaningful democracy would threaten Poland’s role in NATO, an eastern flank that the alliance has come to depend on.

So what can the community of liberal democracies do when the greatest threats to its shared values emanate from countries within the communities established to protect those values?

The most important step is to demonstrate that neither Poland’s staunch opposition to Russian and Chinese imperialism nor Turkey’s strategic balancing act would be an acceptable substitute for the practice of democracy. The U.S. and its allies have no role in telling Poles or Turks for whom they should vote, but they absolutely have a responsibility to insist that members of the NATO alliance conduct elections that are both fair and free, and to insist upon minimum standards of good governance and human rights. Unlike authoritarian strategic partnerships based only on malleable shared interests, the strength of the NATO alliance is rooted in its basis in the more durable shared values of its members — an advantage that should never be surrendered in the name of expedience.

Ultimately, though, the guardians of Turkish and Polish democracy will be, as they have always been, the Turkish and Polish people. This is a cause for hope. The people of Turkey and Poland have each paid dearly, and repeatedly, throughout the 20^th century, to ensure that their countries are sovereign, whole and free. While their paths to democracy were very different, and Turkey’s democratic decline is more advanced than Poland’s, Turks and Poles value their freedom highly, which is why the parties in power, and the corrupt oligarchs who support them, have resorted to such insidious means to dismantle it.

Nathan Kohlenberg is a research assistant at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund. He previously served as a policy associate at the Truman National Security Project, where he remains a fellow.