It was meant to have been Poland’s “Orbán moment”. Last August, the country’s ruling nationalist Law and Justice party voted that parliamentary elections in October should be accompanied by a referendum. Citizens would be asked populist-inflected questions about selling off state assets to foreigners, increasing the retirement age and illegal immigration. The referendum was copy-pasted from a strategy successfully used by Viktor Orbán to consolidate his illiberal regime in Hungary. It was not simply a cynical ploy to allow unlimited public money to be spent on the ruling party’s electoral campaign, it was an effort to frame the elections as a referendum on Polish sovereignty. To oppose the referendum and to vote for the opposition meant not only that you favoured a loss of sovereignty, but that you endorsed neoliberal economic policies and economic occupation by “foreign” powers such as Germany. Law and Justice was sure that it was a tactic that could not go wrong.
As we know, the ploy failed. The fact that the opposition successfully boycotted the referendum held alongside general elections on 15 October (only about 40% of voters took part) reveals one of the least-discussed consequences of the national populists’ long rule in Poland: the paradox that eight years of culture war against liberalism has resulted in Polish society’s dramatic liberalisation.
