Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Politics, in general, and the quality of the nation’s governance has a great impact on the society. Populist rule spoils social relations. Populists antagonize citizens, presenting one group as enemies of the other. However, ending their rule does not entirely stop their detrimental impact on the society. In October 2023, after eight years in power, the populist Law and Justice party, and its coalition the United Right, lost the parliamentary election in Poland. They have not accepted the fact of becoming the opposition and now try to prevent the new government from restoring the rule of law and “repairing” the country. Having broken constitutional order (e.g. freedom of the media and the independence of the legal system), they accuse the ruling coalition of such breaches and “the terror of the rule of law”. False labeling and double standards are characteristic features of the discourse of the “new” opposition. The study analyzes their populist rhetoric. The data used in the study come from our corpus of Polish political discourse, which includes texts representing various genres, e.g. political speeches, mass-media texts (e.g. TV and radio interviews, newspaper articles) and various types of Internet data (e.g. social media posts). A theoretical framework within which the analysis is conducted is the Discourse-Historical Approach, one of the main approaches to Critical Discourse Studies.