The Struggle for Recognition and Polarized Society in Poland
The United Right claims to represent groups of people and cultural values neglected, misrepresented, and deprived of access to cultural circulation for years. According to the right-wing narrative, most Poles have become “strangers in their own land”, ridiculed by the big-city and paternalistic elite. The right-wing version of the populist recognition underlines the idea of a familiar Polishness consisting of ordinary people.
The Coalition in turn upholds that right-wing recognition policy generates contempt for categories of social and politically constructed enemies: critical elites, a large part of the intelligentsia, professionals, sexual and ethnic minorities, and women. The leaders of the liberal-left camp assure their support for these groups. They were struggling for power under the slogan of reconciling the divided society, but the obligations to their electorate and the resentment towards right-wing elites seemed too strong to seek consensus and abandon the logic of the struggle for recognition.
In the concluding remarks, I show how forms of misrecognition experienced by people ease the way to support one camp or the other and add to the ongoing polarization. The struggle for recognition became part of the consciously constructed projects of both camps and their political agendas. It seems a zero-sum game: respect can only be earned at the cost of contempt for the other side.
The presentation is based on a mixed-method study, drawing data from two surveys conducted on a representative sample of Polish society and 96 in-depth qualitative interviews. It also draws on other sources, such as the content analysis of the press and political programs.