In October or November 2023—depending on when the president sets the polling date—Poland will hold elections to the National Assembly. Voters will choose members of the 460-seat Sejm, the lower bicameral body, by proportional representation; members of the 100-seat Senate will be elected in single-member constituencies. Members of parliament serve four-year terms, and the party that wins the most seats in the Sejm typically forms the ruling coalition. Polls from July 2023 gave the populist, socially conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS), which heads the United Right Coalition, a 5 percent lead over Civic Platform (PO), which governed from 2007 to 2015 and leads the opposition.

During 2019 elections, PiS won a record 43.6 percent of the popular vote and maintained its majority in the Sejm, but lost 51 Senate seats to the opposition. Monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which deployed a limited observation mission, reported issues including mistrust among some stakeholders in judicial institutions’ management of electoral complaints, and “media bias and intolerant rhetoric” during the campaign. However, the mission assessed the polls as generally competitive and administered transparently. Ahead of the 2023 election, five of the seven groups that sit in the European Parliament requested that the OSCE conduct a full observation mission, saying the elections “might not be held in the highest democratic standards.”

Since taking power in 2015, a PiS-led coalition has exerted significant political influence over state institutions, inflicting damage to their democratic functioning. For instance, the PiS government has moved aggressively to assert control over the judiciary, passing legislation designed to curb the powers of Constitutional Tribunal (TK) and to install progovernment judges on its benches. It has meanwhile engaged in a lengthy battle with the European Union (EU) over these and other measures. A law on the Supreme Court created powerful new chambers, including the Disciplinary Chamber, which is widely perceived to be influenced by PiS and effectively allows the sanctioning of judges whose rulings contradict government policy. In response to its establishment, the EU issued a fine of €1 million daily against Poland in 2021, which the Polish government has refused to pay. In April 2023, the EU reduced the daily €1 million fine to €500,000 after the Polish parliament passed a law giving disciplinary responsibility to the Supreme Administrative Court—though critics argue that that court responds to government influence as well. In June 2023, the EU’s Court of Justice ruled that Poland’s judicial measures were in violation of EU law. The EU has also withheld €35 billion in COVID-19 recovery funds, saying they will be released when judicial independence is restored.

Other PiS policies have also been criticized for infringing on fundamental freedoms. In May 2023, PiS introduced a law that would enable a commission to investigate anyone perceived to be under “Russian influence” and bar those found guilty from running in elections for up to 10 years. The law drew criticism from democratic governments, and is widely viewed as means to attack the opposition and PO leader Donald Tusk. At the beginning of June 2023, an estimated 500,000 people took to the streets in Warsaw to protest the PiS’s policies, including the “Russian influence” law—though the Sejm ultimately passed a somewhat watered-down version in late July. Separately, Poland’s criminalization of almost all abortions in 2021 once again spurred demonstrations in June 2023, when thousands across the country protested after a pregnant woman died as a result of sepsis.

Freedom House has identified the following as key digital interference issues ahead of the election:

• Harassment and intimidation: State-owned media outlets have a history of harassing journalists, members of the opposition, and their families. In October 2022, for example, the Polish state broadcaster TVP ran misleading video clips about an interview between Brussels-based Polsat correspondent Dorota Bawo?ek, and Donald Tusk, the head of PO. Soon after, she faced an online harassment campaign that included violent threats and claims that she was having an affair with Tusk. In another incident, the public broadcaster Radio Szczecin was denounced by opposition members over an early 2023 story that effectively identified the 15-year-old son of an opposition lawmaker as a victim of sexual assault. The criticism came in March, after the teenager’s family revealed that he had committed suicide. Targeted harassment of prominent journalists and members of the opposition could exacerbate online self-censorship, as a means of avoiding intimidation during the electoral period.
• Information manipulation: Both foreign and domestic online influence operations could threaten Poland’s elections. For years, Poland has been targeted by extensive Russian propaganda, which increased further following Moscow’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. Trolls with suspected links to Russia have spread disinformation about Ukrainian refugees and falsely claimed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was planning to use Polish soldiers as “cannon fodder” in the fighting, though the Polish government has not deployed any soldiers in Ukraine as of July 2023. On the domestic front, state-owned media outlets, including the public broadcaster TVP, spread misleading information ahead of the 2019 election. For instance, one state-owned television outlet reposted a doctored photo depicting climate activist Greta Thunberg alongside philanthropist George Soros, accompanied by false claims that Thunberg was part of a global conspiracy whose targets included PiS. An OSCE election monitoring report on the 2020 presidential election found that TVP acted as “a campaign vehicle for the incumbent.” In May 2023, several private media outlets released a joint statement condemning government efforts to influence the coverage of Wirtualna Polska and Onet, the country’s two most prominent news websites. Given the spread of false and misleading information from Kremlin-linked as well as domestic sources, voters should be wary of false narratives online ahead of the election. Recent years have also seen an increase in rhetoric targeting Muslim migrants and refugees, from both PiS figures and from Tusk, who has accused the PiS of facilitating the migration of Muslims into Poland. An increase in nationalist and discriminatory rhetoric and members of the LGBT+ community further skews the information landscape. 
• Technical attacks: According to Poland’s security agency, the country has been a “constant target” of pro-Russian hackers since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Such attacks could have implications for the 2023 elections. Attacks have primarily impacted government services, private companies, and media organizations. In October 2022, Microsoft researchers discovered a coordinated ransomware campaign targeting the transportation and logistics sectors in Poland, likely conducted by the Russia-based hacking group Iridium. In another attack, Ghostwriter, a hacking operation that has been linked to both the Russian and Belarusian governments, attempted to gain access to social media accounts of prominent individuals in Poland in 2022. In May 2023, major independent or private Polish news sites suffered distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which the government said could have originated from Russia. The attacks on state websites, individual public figures, and news sites suggest Russia-linked actors can employ similar tactics to disrupt the 2023 election.
• Content removal: Journalists who have criticized politicians have been sued or ordered to remove content. In May 2022, Piotr Woyciechowski, the former head of the Polish Security Printing Works and a member of the Polish National Foundation, issued a prelitigation warning concerning alleged defamation to leading Polish daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza and its journalist Agnieszka Kublik. The document demanded an article covering the testimony of Andrzej Malinowski, a politician and the former president of the Employers of the Republic of Poland, who had spoken about the use of Pegasus spyware in an April 2022 Senate hearing, be removed from the outlet’s website. The threat of content removal could be further weaponized in the lead-up to the election.
• Arrests and prosecution for online activity: While Polish residents do not risk long-term detention or prison for online speech, there have been cases of legal threats and short-term detentions, particularly related to reporting on migration at the Polish border with Belarus. Though Poland has welcomed millions of refugees from Ukraine, those from other countries—usually with Muslim-majority populations—have been mistreated by border guards. In November 2021, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that at least seven journalists who had been covering migrants and refugees on the Polish border had been detained and had their phones confiscated. These past detentions of journalists covering sensitive issues raises concerns that authorities could take legal measures against those covering similarly sensitive topics during the election campaign.

Poland has a score of 74 out of 100, with 100 representing the least vulnerability in terms of election integrity, on Freedom House’s Election Vulnerability Index, which is based on a selection of key election-related indicators. The score reflects a relatively open online environment, but one that is threatened by disinformation campaigns, technical attacks, and legal threats against government critics. Poland is rated Free in Freedom in the World 2023, with a score of 81 out of 100 with respect to its political rights and civil liberties, and as a Semi-Consolidated Democracy in Nations in Transit 2023, with a score of 59 out of 100 for democratic governance. Poland is not covered by Freedom on the Net.