Boosting civil society or enhancing clientelism in Poland? Law and Justice’s links with civic organisations.

The objective of this paper is to explore connections between the Law and Justice (PiS) and the organised civil society in Poland. The party ruling in Poland from 2015 owed its successes partially to stable support from the organisations and associations operating under auspices of the Catholic Church. It appeared, however, that this alliance has not been exclusively built on common beliefs and values but it was also based on clientelistic links. This was repeated before 2015 as a prediction but it came true after PiS formed the government. Certainly, the differentiation should be made since this coalition might be recognised as two-dimensional. On the one hand, there is cooperation between the party, its officials and the institution of Catholic Church. This relation might be regarded as a type of symphony, which term was coined to denote close cooperation between state and church in Orthodox countries but was adopted to understand links between Vatican and Catholic states (Stan, Turcescu 2007: 5). On the other hand, PiS developed cooperation also with civic organisations. In this paper, we would like to focus on two of them. One is the Radio Maryja Family (RRM), a union of social clubs attended by radio listeners, backing up and making donations to the radio station associated with the Catholic Church and led by Tadeusz Rydzyk, one of the most influential figures of the anti-liberal radical wing in the Polish Catholic Church, and the other is the Priest Piotr Skarga Christian Culture Association (SKCh im. Ks. Piotra Skargi), for which the fight against the abortion might be recognised as a flagship project. These organisations were harnessed by PiS for accomplishing its goals indirectly since both of them have had political arms – Lux Veritatis (LV), with Tadeusz Rydzyk as a head, in the case of the radio listeners and Ordo Iuris (OI), established by SKCh. They both (LV and OI) were set up as foundations. As it was found they were supported financially with public subsidies disproportionately when compared to other initiatives in Poland. This gap was huge and thus it can be argued that PiS built clientelistic links. The presence of clientelistic orientation in Poland was confirmed by the opinions of experts that contributed to Varieties of Democracy research. The very first stage of this process was already analysed by Markowski (2019). Apart from clientelistic links in which RRM and SKCh were indirectly incorporated, it can be emphasised that organisations operating under auspices of the Catholic Church in Poland might be considered as one of the most attractive for the society in terms of how many activists they managed to involve in their initiatives. According to Public Opinion Research Centre (CBOS 2020, March), 6.5% Poles in 2019 dedicated their spare time being engaged in supporting activities of these organisations. It is worth highlighting this was one of the highest results.