A Cold War legacy of student politics and anti-communism: the contingency of Poland’s illiberal turn

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers a historical reflection on the roots of the populist-driven “illiberal turn” in Poland. Acknowledging the backsliding of recent years as the result of political contingency and the agency of a critical mass of disruptive political actors on the Right, the article argues that the “illiberal turn” was precipitated by the interplay of three historical factors, such as dynamics of Cold War era student politics, the demise of communism in 1989 with its echoes in the subsequent decades, and the implosion of the strong post-communist Centre-Left in the mid-2000s. These processes have ensured that Poland’s political trajectory has been more sui generis than understood through the general prism of the rise of populism and that it is more the result of an entrenched political class whose worldviews have been forged by the anticommunism of the 1980s and its legacy.