Decoupling the Climate Change Issue from the Left-Wing Agenda: Potential Turning Point for Successful Energy Transition in Poland?

During the last few years, the Polish right-wing populist party-in-power (PiS) has changed its stance on European Green Deal by moving towards a reluctant acceptance to achieve carbon neutrality until 2050. Similarly, the public opinion has also shifted over the last five years towards higher recognition of climate change as a serious threat, higher acceptance of a need for climate mitigation policies and, in particular, higher support for decarbonization in Poland. Falling costs of renewable energy sources and increasing costs of carbon energy in Poland, as well as generous funding from the European Union for just energy transition were important factors shaping the public opinion and, especially, the ruling political parties’ stance on achieving the climate neutrality. However, I argue that the crucial shift in public opinion – although still fragile and not irreversible - happened largely due to the climate activists’ efforts to decouple the climate issue from the leftist agenda. Indeed, the issue of energy transition in Poland is still largely associated with the political and ideological conflict that has especially strengthened under the rule of the right-wing populist government. Decouple the issue of climate change from those of women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, anti-racism and anti-capitalism might have been a turning point, which shifted an otherwise polarized public opinion towards a more consensual one on the issue of climate change policy. In order to test this hypothesis, I conduct a discourse analysis of the main narratives of the key climate activists’ groups between 2018 and 2021 and perform process tracing connecting the narratives with the shift in public opinion.