Othering the EU in the Polish Right-Wing Parties' Discourse: Aims, Strategies and Consequences

Since the 1989, the strong pro-European sentiment characterised the Polish society and its elites. At its grounds laid a view depicting the EU as a community of values to which Poles want to belong. The more critical views on the EU has been also visible, yet this voices for long stayed much more marginalised and usually located at the peripheries of the main political debate. The situation changed in pre-accession period when the Eurosceptic or Euro-reject parties entered the Polish parliament challenging the consensus on the positive evaluation of the EU and Poland becoming a part of this project. Since 2004 however the Eurosceptic and often populist formations have been present on political scene and also growing in significance. The success of the United Right (in which Law and Justice was the main formation) in 2015 elections was the latest and most spectacular prove of popularity of such political parties. Slowly but steadily they have developed more critical or even negative narratives on the European integration, shifting them from the peripheries of the public debate towards the political centre. Proposed paper focuses on analysis of the ways the EU is constructed in the discourse of the currently ruling United Right. We investigate how the EU is presented in relation to the (Polish) nation state and national identity and what sort of mechanisms of othering are used in these constructions. We use the selected debates from the Polish Sejm on future of the European integration as an empirical material for our research.