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Viewed until recently as an exemplar of democratic transformation, Poland is increasingly seen as a leading case of democratic backsliding thanks to a series of illiberal measures pushed through by the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party. PiS ascended to power in 2015. It has used to its advantage a politicized conspiracy theory about the crash of a government plane outside Smolensk in 2010; a dual power structure; and a narrative of \"sovereign democracy.\" Since 2015, it has sought to make systemic changes to Poland's political landscape, for instance by weakening institutional checks and balances through changes to the judicial system, pressuring media outlets, and replacing the boards of the country's public companies. Currently, Poland's decentralized political structure remains the most important counterweight to the country's rising illiberalism.

In this article we try to compare and characterize the two electoral debates (one in Poland, between Donald Tusk and Jarosław Kaczyński, held on the 12th of October 2007 and the second, in Spain, be- tween Mariano Rajoy Brey and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero held on the 25th of March 2008) from the point of view of the use of pronouns and their persuasive value. The study that we present below analyzes the discursive performance of the four politicians. This research is elaborated at the syntactic level and specifically the use of deictics: I, we, you.

Remarkably, this legacy lives on even after 50 years of Soviet political and architectural influence. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, political commentators have correctly predicted a resurgence of the Central European states. Most recently, populist leaders have also come into power in the Czech Republic and in Austria, with Czech billionaire-turned-politician Andrej Babis acting as prime minister and the young Austrian Sebastian Kurz, leader of the Austrian People's Party, elected as chancellor. [...]the southern reaches of Poland, then ruled by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, faced significant threat from Ottoman armies, with Polish forces fighting the Turks many times and turning the tide at the 1683 siege of Vienna.

It seems clear that there is a common ideological foundation linking Putin, Le Pen, Orbán, Erdoğan, Trump, Kaczyński, and others, but labeling that ideology has been difficult. Many in the media have called them “populists,” but this term can be misleading and imprecise. This essay focuses on Poland in order to propose a genealogy that transcends conventional divisions between left and right. The phrase “exclusionary egalitarianism” helps us recognize the intertwined commitments to both racism and nationalism on the one hand, and an opposition to inequalities of wealth and status on the other. While the analogy to the radical right of the 1930s is helpful, there is an even closer link to the “national communists” of the 1960s and 1970s.