The (right-wing) conspiracy theorists who have taken over Poland

Jarosław Kaczyński has convinced Poland that it is threatened by a shadowy leftwing cabal – and become the country’s most powerful man

With a penchant for conspiracy and a vituperative speaking style, Jarosław Kaczyński routinely brands his opponents “gangsters”, “cronies”, and “reds”. Before the parliamentary elections in October 2015, he claimed that migrants from the Middle East were bringing cholera and dysentery to Europe, risking the spread of “various parasites and protozoa”. More recently, he implied that people demonstrating against the Law and Justice government were “the worst sort of Poles” – an epithet they have adopted as a badge of honour.

Commonly labelled conservative or nationalist, Law and Justice blends the religious and patriotic rituals of Poland’s long history of resistance to foreign oppression with hostility to free-market capitalism and a heavy dose of conspiracy regarding the machinations of Poland’s enemies. It is the vanguard of a movement that goes far beyond the party itself, supported by sympathetic smaller parties, ultra-Catholic media, nationalist youth organisations and an assortment of cranks and cynics who share a hostility to liberalism in all its guises. As foreign minister Witold Waszczykowski told the German tabloid Bild, his government “only wants to cure our country of a few illnesses”, such as: “a new mixture of cultures and races, a world made up of cyclists and vegetarians, who only use renewable energy and who battle all signs of religion … What moves most Poles [is] tradition, historical awareness, love of country, faith in God and normal family life between a woman and a man.”

And yet a significant minority of Poles believe that Poland and Polishness remain subject to foreign control and malign internal forces. It is a belief rooted in Poland’s traumatic past and the chaos and controversies of its post-communist transition – encouraged by Jarosław Kaczyński’s consistent assertions that this transition was, in fact, a sham. Poland’s present turmoil is the story of how anger at Poland’s liberals mutated into a war on liberal democracy itself.

It is an assertion that depends on the notion of Poland eternally under siege. There is no consensus as to precisely who or what poses a threat – it could be Russia or the European Union, it could be multiculturalism, it could be homosexuality, it could be western consumerism, it could be Jews or reds under the bed. What matters is the idea that Poland’s liberals, with their commitment to the nation’s existing institutions and nostalgia for its cosmopolitan past, are doing nothing about it. It is not “nationalism” in the traditional sense but something less coherent, more akin to a mood than an ideology – a narrative of righteousness, victimhood, and self-pity from which anyone can pick their prejudices as they see fit.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/16/conspiracy-theorists-who-have-taken-over-poland