The Law and Justice Party in Poland: Family Romances, National Romances

Abstract

The Polish example represents what might be called the “soft” version of totalitarianism and differs radically from the two other personalities in several respects: the non-usage of the extreme barbaric violence specific to the USSR and the Islamic State; its resolve to be fully admitted as a European state and therefore as being acknowledged by the political opposition. This leads to its fundamental difference from the others in terms of its orientation toward democracy and the capitalist market economy. The fact remains, however, that several dynamics underlying the political action previously analyzed can also be identified in the PiS, starting with the ambition to substitute other reference points for commonly accepted temporal and spatial references, in order to replace them with an alternative vision of history. From the outset, the objective is to impose another truth that would likely orient political decisions differently.