Memory, Politics and the “Populist” Moment Kate Korycki University of Toronto Paper prepared for presentation at the Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA) annual meeting at Ryerson University, Toronto, May 30 - June 1, 2017. DRAFT Comments and questions are most welcome. Please direct them to
[email protected] Korycki/CPSA 2017/ Draft - do not cite without permission. Introduction In 2015, Poland held legislative and executive elections. Both were won by the Law and Justice Party (PiS).1 Its victories ended an almost decade-long reign of PiS’s main adversary, the Civic Platform (PO),2 and they obliterated from legislature the third major player, the Democratic Left Alliance3 - and they were surprising. They were surprising because they brought to power a party, which claimed that communism was still a clear and present danger in Poland. Since the election, the PiS’s maneuvers and policies, especially those relating to the media and the judiciary, have been characterized as populist and authoritarian: threatening democracy and the rule of law. They prompted demonstrations and protests from the concerned Poles, alarms from foreign commentators, and rebukes from the EU (Garton Ash 2016, Duval Smith 2015a, and 2015b, Rankin 2016). In this paper I concentrate on PiS’s electoral moves, and I take the party’s charge of persisting communism seriously. I do this in an analytical, not a substantive, sense - that is, I do not give credence to the notion that communism rules Poland, but I track the political productivity of such a construction. In doing so I contribute to the understanding of the discursive mechanisms implicated in the contemporary iteration of the so-called populist moment.