A model of ‘tolerant’ national and supranational opposition to populist in power: The case of Poland

The ways of responding to populist parties in power, in a democratic state, are still under researched. Existing publications point to the reactions of diverse actors, including international organizations, but do not offer a systematic and in-depth analysis of how these actors react and coexist. The analysed case of reactions to the populist party in Poland concerns a situation in which the populists held an autonomous majority in the parliament and, through their policies, slowly but systematically changed liberal democracy towards authoritarianism. The aim of this paper is to examine how different actors opposed governing populist Law and Justice and to explain the observed pattern. We argue that the opposition in Poland to populists in power was a mix of tolerant, national and international initiatives, which we call a pincer movement model of opposition. Our research indicates that actors most actively opposing populist were civil society and public institutions, with a significant share of reactions coming from the European Union. Political parties, on the other hand, tried not to internationalise their opposition, as they did not want the Law and Justice party to use this argument against them. Our aim is to explain how the reactions of national actors coexisted with supranational once and why actors did not act intolerantly towards populists in power. The analysis is based on the responses to the governing Law and Justice party, in their office term between 2015 and 2019. We use Bourn’s typology of opposition to populist parties (Bourn 2023). The paper applies a thematic content analysis based on press articles. The coding process covered two newspapers from each Wednesday edition.