Jarosław Kaczyński understood something about Polish politics that much of the left never quite did.
People do not experience class simply as income. They experience it as dignity too.
That word has run through the political language of PiS for years. Andrzej Duda’s victorious 2015 presidential campaign used the slogan “Godne życie w bezpiecznej Polsce” – “A dignified life in a safe Poland.”
Kaczyński understood the other side of the same equation: indignity.
At the Smolensk commemorations in 2015 he said Law and Justice (PiS) was fighting not only for truth but for godność – dignity. A year later, amid the confrontation with European institutions over the Constitutional Tribunal, he insisted Poland had to preserve both its sovereignty and national dignity.
PiS recently saw its largest split in decades; Mateusz Morawiecki’s Rozwój Plus is trying to occupy a new ‘developmental-conservative’ space; Konfederacja remains strong; Grzegorz Braun has built a significant constituency further to the right. Recent polls put Konfederacja around 13–15%, Braun’s party around 9%, while Lewica (the Left) sits around 6–7% and Razem (leftish) around the parliamentary threshold.
This is normally described ideologically. Nationalism. Populism. Euroscepticism. Libertarianism. Catholic conservatism.
But underneath it perhaps sits something older.
Dignity. Yeah, still there.
PiS understood this before much of the Polish left did.
Its great political achievement was not simply 500+ or pension supplements. It translated material inequality into dignity.
The provincial voter was not poor because wages were low, housing insecure or capital geographically concentrated.
He had been looked down on.
Warsaw laughed at him.
Brussels instructed him.
Liberals regarded him as backward.
Germany profited while Poland obeyed.
Material injury became symbolic humiliation.
That is an extraordinarily powerful political operation because money and recognition become fused.
Now the right is reorganising that inheritance.
Morawiecki offers one fantasy: the ambitious Poland of infrastructure, nuclear power, technology, capital and national champions. The country as upwardly mobile executive.
Konfederacja offers another: taxes, bureaucracy and the state prevent energetic individuals from getting ahead. Class anger becomes entrepreneurial resentment.
Braun goes further. His politics offers transgression itself: the pleasure of saying what polite society prohibits, humiliating those supposedly protected by liberal convention, breaking the rules while others gasp.
Different programmes and electorates, but each organises a relationship to status.
Who is above me?
Who humiliates me?
Who lives from my work?
Who gets protected?
Who is laughing?
And here the Polish left has a problem.
Not because it lacks policies.
Lewica and Razem talk about housing, labour rights, healthcare, public services and redistribution. Razem’s recent polling improvement suggests there is an audience for a more explicitly material politics.
The problem is that policy is not yet organisation.
Class is not simply income deciles.
Class lives in bodies, accents, education, addresses, expectations, confidence, shame. It determines who feels entitled to enter the room and who already expects to be patronised once inside.
Lacan adds something nastier.
Politics needs a fantasy explaining why satisfaction is missing.
The right supplies objects continuously.
Brussels.
Migrants.
Elites.
Germany.
Liberals.
Ukraine, increasingly.
Someone has stolen the thing that would otherwise allow us to become what we were meant to be.
The left often replies with a fact-check.
That is not enough.
The unanswered question is not merely what should the state spend?
It is: Who are the people whose labour holds Poland together, and what do they deserve?
Nurses.
Teachers.
Warehouse workers.
Drivers.
Young people paying absurd rents.
Parents financing childhood through credit.
Small businesses feeding ZUS before themselves.
People in Warsaw earning good salaries who still cannot buy somewhere to live.
People outside Warsaw watching capital, prestige and opportunity migrate elsewhere.
The Polish right has spent a decade organising the humiliation. The left hasn’t.
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