Civil Society as 'Establishment Elite': The Case of Poland’s 'Great Orchestra' Charity

In January 2019, Mayor of Gdańsk Paweł Adamowicz was murdered in his city at a concert of the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity, a Polish civil society fundraising organisation. Though not directly related, the murder drew attention to negative publicity campaigns against the Great Orchestra and its founder, partly driven by members of the national-conservative Polish government, state television and government-friendly media. This paper examines the nature of these campaigns in connection with the anti-elite, populist dimensions of the ruling party’s political platform and support base. In particular, the paper will examine the use of the concepts of “pseudo-elite” and “pseudo-authorities,” propagated to discredit civil society actors supposedly associated with the post-communist or liberal post-Solidarity “establishment” of the post-1989 Third Polish Republic. From this point of view, civil society initiatives are perceived as inauthentic and driven by both internal and external elites hostile to traditional models of Polish identity. For instance, the charitable work of the Great Orchestra is presented partly as a front for a progressive social agenda at odds with the traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church. In this context, the Orchestra appears as a rival to the Church in both its specific charitable activities and the values it supposedly represents. This narrative forms part of the broader populist dimension of the ruling party’s ideology, which presents a conflict between “pseudo-elites” representing external interests or values and a genuine elite aligned with the “authentic” Polish “nation.”