Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Poland’s de facto leader for the past eight years, always said his Law and Justice (PiS) party would need three electoral terms to truly transform the country.
To the relief of Polish liberals and most of the European Union, Kaczynski is unlikely to get his wish after several opposition parties collectively took more seats than PiS in parliamentary elections last month and now plan to form a joint government.
The new coalition will not find it easy to reverse the changes wrought by PiS, which attacked the independence of Poland’s judiciary, state media and other core institutions of democracy and made them tools of Kaczynski and his allies, whose time in power has been marked by constant conflicts with an exasperated Brussels.
PiS may now be heading for opposition, but it remains Poland’s biggest single party and showed after losing power in 2007 that it can bounce back from defeat, so the timing of The New Politics of Poland should not deter potential readers of Jaroslaw Kuisz’s insightful analysis of his homeland’s plunge into nationalist and illiberal populism.
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Fear and resentment have always been prominent in the rhetoric of PiS, which enjoys core support among older, provincial, strongly Catholic Poles, who are most receptive to its claims that they are being wronged by an arrogant urban elite that is undermining their livelihoods and traditional values with support from a recklessly liberal West.
Poland of course celebrated its reconnection with the West after the collapse of communism in 1989, but for Kaczynski the peaceful transition to democracy was unsatisfactory because communists were not sufficiently punished – and he was pushed aside at the time by Solidarity movement leader Lech Walesa and other rivals.
In power, PiS framed its attacks on the rule of law as belated “decommunisation” of Poland’s courts, and used issues such as migration and LGBTQ+ rights to whip up fears for a national identity, based on conservative Catholicism, that is still precious to many Poles.
Such fears are particularly resonant in Poland because of its long history of division and occupation by its powerful neighbours, Germany and Russia, making its modern politics a case study in what Kuisz calls “post-traumatic sovereignty”. It is a condition worth studying for the nations afflicted and their neighbours.
