David against Goliath à la Polonaise. Opposition responding strategies towards populist right-wing Law and Justice in rule-of-law debates 2015-2023

Abstract

In the Polish case of recent right-wing populism, this thesis pioneered opposition response strategies of two established and assumed non-populist opposition actors, PO (KO) and SLD, towards populist right-wing incumbent PiS. Perceiving of populism as a political style that features an appeal to ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’, ‘bad manners’ and the performance of crisis, breakdown or threat (Moffitt, 2016b: 45), the two research questions sought to answer were what strategies PO employed to respond to the populist right-wing PiS in rule-of-law debates in the Sejm 2015-2019, and what strategies KO and the SLD employed to respond to the populist right-wing PiS in rule-of-law debates 2019-2023. Defining party strategies as results-orientated constructs of political actors that bear on crosssituational goal-means-environment calculations (Raschke & Tils, 2011: 56-57), PO (KO)’s and SLD’s strategies were analysed employing the party response typology by Albertazzi et al. (2021). The analysis was conducted as a qualitative content analysis of opposition statements in 16 randomly chosen rule-of-law debates in the Sejm between November 2015 and July 2023. The analysis found a strategy pattern (clashing, co-optation, cooperation, other strategies) displayed by both PO (KO) and SLD. Both parties revealed a populist behaviour perpetuated by qua actor co-optation of PiS. While PO (KO) showed a distinct populist behaviour itself, SLD appeared more moderate mediating the duopoly between PO (KO) and PiS. These findings suggest that Polish party competition is not a contestation between non-populists and populists. Co-optation of strategy becomes crucial for opposition actors responding to a populist incumbent.