The Impact of Social Movements: Electoral Stability and Constraint in Poland

• In Event: Dominant Parties and Democracy: the Role of Party Organization

Abstract

The 2015 political success of the Law and Justice (PiS) and a relatively high support for its government throughout the 2015–2019 parliamentary term has been explained by, among other phenomena, comparatively high Gallagher’s disproportionality index and authoritarian clientelism. It is less frequently emphasized that PiS incorporated in its platform, prior to the elections and during its term, various initiatives, organizations (church organizations, trade unions, associations and others), and smaller parties in order to maximize its electoral performance and maintain support for its policies. This paper argues that while this quasi social movement coalition helped PiS in the acquisition of power, after the electoral success it can both help the party securing its electoral base, as well as limit the potential of extending it to new groups of voters.

After regaining power in 2015 PiS initiated a state driven and openly anti-liberal systemic change without, however, electoral and social support comparable to Viktor Orbán-led Fidesz – Christian Democratic People’s Party alliance which won enough seats to modify the Hungarian constitution. Lacking the constitutional majority, PiS government has in practice taken over the Constitutional Tribunal, as well as specific areas of court system following also the usual practice of Polish governments of extending its power to the state owned media and companies. These attempts, as regularly conducted opinion polls suggest, have not yet increased PiS support enough to become a dominant party with a fully-fledged constitutional majority after the 2019 parliamentary elections. Achieving this goal would, inter alia, require to include different types of constituencies which would often make it necessary to overcome ideological and/or partisan divisions in civil society maintained and strengthened also by the current government through various policies and gestures, e.g., financial and institutional support of specific types of civil society actors at the expense and sometimes openly against other organizations. PiS in this way limits its capacity to engage organizations placed ideologically outside the already established coalitions.

In order to present how the government tries to resolve this tension, the paper analyzes attempts by PiS to take over various types of initiatives and organizations – a process that has already been attempted by the party through the extension of the national-conservative discourse to new ideological territories often attributed to liberal or left-wing political actors, or changes introduced in the organizational status of specific institutions traditionally connected with other political parties. With respect to the former one can indicate the purposeful incorporation of various elements of other parties’ narratives in the discourse on Polish patriotism. Hence economic individualism is portrayed as economic patriotism, fight with air pollution – local patriotism. The most vivid example of the latter practice is an attempt of a merger of the Volunteer Fire Departments (a set of over 16 000 organizations scattered around Poland with a strong influence on local politics, traditionally connected with the Polish Peasant Party) with the Territorial Defense, the recently formed fifth military branch of the Polish Armed Forces.

Author

• Marcin Ślarzyński, Polish Academy of Sciences