Excerpts from a Do Rzeczy commentary piece by lawyer Mikołaj Drozdowicz
In the initial period of transformation, the most lucrative economic processes were taken over by the nomenclature, former secret service officers and various sly ones preying on the weakness of the state. The two terms of the PiS government, and especially the years 2015-2019 free from the turmoil of war and pandemic, were undoubtedly the best period for Poland in economic terms after 1989. Not so much because the ruling party, under the slogan of caring for citizens, launched large-scale social transfers, but rather because the perhaps unintended effect of social programs was the dissemination of the effects of economic growth among broad social masses.
Stimulating consumption gave a chance to a huge number of domestic entrepreneurs to move from the Stone Age to the Iron Age.
Looking at it from this perspective, one might get the impression that, paradoxically, the greatest beneficiary of PiS rule was the sui generis metropolitan middle class, which was able to accumulate the effects of social transfers, and aspiring groups, i.e., people who, regardless of their place of residence, imitate the behavioral patterns characteristic of successful people.
However, as the level of prosperity or at least a sense of affluence increases, social conditions also change. As a result, the urban class has gained and confirmed its autonomy, fueled by economic processes that are beneficial to it, and PiS, completely failing to understand this, has become a victim of its own success.
Not every city dweller hates PiS, but almost everyone perceives Jarosław Kaczyński’s party as an aesthetically alien, embarrassing and anachronistic formation. PiS has become an unelectable party for these people. Not because it is wrong, but because of the dramatic cultural gap. I do not write this maliciously, but for the urban electorate, Antoni Macierewicz, Marek Suski, Barbara Nowak, or Beata Gosiewska are creatures from Mars. It is not about a political program or views at all.
Quite simply, the current PiS electorate is dying out and shrinking along with the increase in society’s wealth, cultural changes and the spread of a lifestyle that PiS governments have made possible. These changes may permanently set the glass ceiling of PiS support at around 30 percent.
Since December 2023, Tusk’s team has been deliberately causing various media scandals that cover up real problems and abuses of power. (Such) scoundrel methods based on extreme injustice and harm done to specific people are effective because morally righteous opposition only engages hard-core PiS supporters precisely because of the alienation of everyone else.
Focusing on fighting or mobilizing when there is no one left to mobilize, will not be enough. In order for the right wing to govern again, it needs to be thoroughly renewed and an attempt to bridge the cultural chasm that has separated PiS from a large part of society is needed. Without opening up to new environments, without creating a separate program offer for the big-city and aspiring electorate, without engaging new people who, due to their origin, life path and professional career, to establish a dialogue with the city dwellers, PiS will become a political structure that is permanently anachronistic and incapable of gaining power.
The selection of Karol Nawrocki as a presidential candidate only confirms the above theses. This politician, who otherwise makes a good first impression, was not chosen because of his distinctiveness or achievements, but precisely because he remains an unknown figure to most Poles and, at least in principle, not associated with the activities of PiS. And that is good. Because if the party is putting forward a formally non-party candidate in the presidential elections so that he is associated with the party as little as possible, it is a sign that perhaps, at least intuitively, Jarosław Kaczyński is aware that he is currently managing a (party in decline).
One of the most outstanding Polish humanists and an authority on Polish patriots, Professor Andrzej Nowak, has already expressed a rationally critical opinion on the functioning of PiS several times, demanding that internal party reforms be carried out. During the recent Polska Wielki Projekt congress, it was interesting but rather not very “PiS-like.”
Political life on the right really does exist outside PiS, although due to the party system still operating, proof of this may paradoxically be the successive electoral defeats of Jarosław Kaczyński’s party.
The main opposition party needs not only to implement the principles of meritocracy at the level of the political environment, new pieces on the chessboard and good program ideas, but above all to build the conviction that it represents something more than a confectionary and anachronistic version of patriotism. It must stop being associated with embarrassment and backwaters because this is the only way to try to break down the wall that is permanently starting to separate PiS from the majority of society, which has been helplessly surrendered to Donald Tusk’s mercy.
