I was in Warsaw, Poland, and Aarhus, Denmark last week on the heels of recent elections in both countries. The victory of Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform party over the incumbent Law and Justice party in the Polish case was genuinely uplifting.

Poland has been ruled for the past two years by a pair of identical twins, Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who served as President and Prime Minister, respectively. (A number of Poles asked whether it shouldn’t be a principle of constitutional law that two branches of government cannot be held by monozygotic twins, since that would violate the principle of separation of powers.) The Kaczynskis’ Law and Justice Party was nationalistic, anti-European, narrow-minded, and populist, picking an unnecessary historical fight with neighboring Germany whose support they badly need. They started a lustration process against people who worked with the Communist secret police, eighteen years after the downfall of the old regime, while denouncing, like the old nomenklatura, those who had done well in the new market economy as cheats and opportunists. The resulting polarization of Polish society has led to cynicism about the state of democracy as such, part of a broader trend that has infected other parts of Eastern Europe in recent years.

Hard as it is for someone my age understand, the generation of Poles who have grown up since the fall of Communism have virtually no historical memory of what it represented; they take Poland’s contemporary democracy for granted and feel little emotional connection to the great struggles of their parents’ generation. Those who haven’t emigrated to other parts of the European Union are preoccupied with getting ahead in their daily lives and have been largely apathetic, if not downright cynical, about politics. Many were embarrassed by the Kaczynskis but felt they couldn’t do much about it—a passive attitude towards political leaders that some of my interlocutors in Warsaw felt harkened back to the days of Communism. Law and Justice by contrast appeals to less educated rural voters who turn out to vote in much higher numbers than their younger urban counterparts. Part of the reason that Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform won the election was that his party and a number of NGOs and political activists organized a massive get-out-the-vote campaign among younger Poles. The election was thus a very valuable lesson for them: participating in democratic politics can make a difference; democracy is something that can never be taken for granted.

Denmark has been governed in recent years by a coalition led by Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s Liberal Party, together with the populist Danish People’s Party. The latter is a backlash party that has campaigned against refugees and immigrants coming into the country. What was interesting about this election was the launching of a new party, the New Alliance, led by a Syrian-born Muslim named Naser Khader. The party’s goal was to permit either the Liberals or the Social Democrats to form a coalition with it, thereby pushing the anti-immigrant People’s Party out of the government. Khader is an interesting character: he has positioned himself as a “moderate” Muslim, who supported the right of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper’s editor Flemming Rose to publish the satyrical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005, but he doesn’t like the People’s Party’s intolerance of Muslims. The New Alliance was at one time expected to get as many as 20 seats in parliament, but they only got five, so the old coalition will remain in power.

Fogh Rasmussen’s Liberal Party is liberal in the classic sense of wanting smaller government, but that’s an uphill struggle in contemporary Denmark. The top marginal tax bracket is around 63%, and you reach this with an income of only about €70,000. His government hasn’t done much while in power to lower taxes or cut back the welfare state; unlike France, it’s not clear that it needs much trimming since the economy has been booming in recent years. To me this shows that the “laws” of economics can’t be as universal as they pretend to be, since what kills incentives and creates moral hazard in one society doesn’t necessarily have the same effect in another. Denmark has been quite supportive of the United States, sending troops to both Iraq and Afghanistan (they’re in a tough place, Helmand province); and yet foreign policy was scarcely an issue in the election. So unlike Poland, their recent vote does not seem to be likely to lead to much of a change.