1 Introduction

Data collection and analysis, as well as the write up of the chapter occurred before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 and the parliamentary elections in October 2023 in Poland, which resulted in the victory of the democratic opposition to illiberal populism. The analysis does not consider these changes, which impacted policy-making in the welfare and migration domains in Poland.

Several countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are currently undergoing a transformation from ‘new’ to ‘illiberal’ democracies. Illiberalism is a variety of populism, which in turn is most commonly defined as an “ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” (Mudde, 2004: 543). Because populism lacks core values, it can be both right- or left-wing and, in order to give itself ideological substance, it nests into more established host ideologies (Mudde, 2004). Illiberal populism is a right-wing variety of populism based on “a nativist concept of belonging, linked to a chauvinist and racialized concept of ‘the people’ and ‘the nation’” (Wodak, 2015: 47). According to Grzebalska and Pető, illiberal populism can be compared to a polypore — a parasitic fungus that feeds on a rotten tree while contributing to its decay, producing a fully dependent organism in return (Grzebalska & Pető, 2018). In this analogy, the rotten tree is neoliberalism.

Scholars and commentators alike identify illiberal populism in CEE as a nationalist response to the excesses of neoliberalism (Grzebalska & Pető, 2018; Korolczuk & Graff, 2018). In most CEE countries, the 1990s and early 2000s were characterized by a strong neoliberal consensus. Political parties from across the spectrum were committed to a brand of privatization that came with the marginalization of trade unions, increasing unemployment, wealth disparities and poverty (Ost, 2005). Illiberalism is said to be a reactionary response to a liberal democratic project that failed to keep neoliberalism in check (Grzebalska & Pető, 2018).

In this chapter, I show that, although populism is indeed a reaction to previous liberal policies, it rests on similar ideological foundations. Using welfare and immigration as case studies, I show that, in CEE, there are significant continuities between liberal democratic and illiberal populist policies. Familialism and racist understandings of national interest remained core paradigms of welfare and immigration policies in Poland after the electoral victories of illiberal populists.

Family policy is the privileged area of right-wing populist intervention into the welfare domain (Korolczuk & Graff, 2018). Populist governments in CEE have used large-scale child benefit programs as an electoral and legitimation tool. As a consequence, research into illiberal family policies in CEE has been flourishing (Bartha et al., 2020; Lendvai-Bainton & Szelewa, 2020; Szelewa, 2017). In this chapter I opt for a broader focus on care. Such a wider outlook enables to examine a wide array of social policies concerning not only children, but also senior citizens and people with disabilities. Immigration is another “core issue” for populist radical-right parties (Röth et al., 2018: 325). Their opposition to immigration occurs at a time when care needs in many countries around the world are increasingly fulfilled by migrant workers (Safuta et al., 2022). In Poland, families are privately hiring migrant women (mostly from Ukraine) who provide home care to older dependent people (Safuta, 2017). This ‘functional equivalent’ to family care alleviates needs while enabling policy-makers to eschew substantial reforms of Poland’s familialist care regime (Safuta, 2021). As a result, migrant care work is an issue with low political salience in Poland (Matuszczyk, 2020).

The two main players of the Polish polity are the populist nationalist Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS in Polish) and its biggest rival, the liberal conservative Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska, PO). Created in 2001, PiS first came to power in 2005. In 2007, PiS’s minority government resigned, prompting anticipated parliamentary elections. Founded in 2001, PO governed for two consecutive terms between 2007 and 2015, in coalition with the Polish Peasant Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe, PSL). In those years, PiS was the largest opposition party in parliament. In May 2015, PiS candidate Andrzej Duda won the presidential election, followed the same year by the party’s victory in the parliamentary elections. In 2019, PiS won the legislatives for the second time and established a majority government with small right-wing parties Agreement (Porozumienie), United Poland (Solidarna Polska) and The Republicans (Republikanie). The following year Duda was re-elected for a second 5-year mandate.

2 How PiS Fits the Illiberal Populist Mould

Populist policy-making has strong discursive features: it makes extensive use of adversarial narratives, Manichean language, strategic metaphors and crisis frames (Bartha et al., 2020: 74). PiS’s politics fit this definition of populism as an ideology separating society into an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. The party constantly targets social groups that it singles out as enemies of ‘the Polish people’ − alternately the opposition, ‘elites from Brussels’, Germany, refugees, LGBTQI+ people (Gdula & Sutowski, 2017; Yermakova, 2019). LGBTQI+ people became the designated enemy during the 2019 legislative and European campaigns, as well as in the 2020 presidential election (Yermakova, 2021). Despite considerable inflows from Ukraine, immigration was a low-salience issue in Poland until 2015, when PiS made it the center of its electoral campaign by forcefully protesting the idea that Poland would host refugees as part of the relocation quotas negotiated at EU-level by the previous PO government (Łodziński & Szonert, 2017).

PiS leverages the accusation of anti-Polishness against social groups, but also phenomena (such as abortion or sex education in schools) or ideas (feminism or ‘gender ideology’) (Graff & Korolczuk, 2022; Korolczuk & Graff, 2018). Populists are also critical of technocratic governance, in which the legitimacy of political decisions rests on technical, scientific or administrative expertise (Bickerton & Invernizzi Accetti, 2017; Caramani, 2017). PiS’s rhetoric is premised on the populist claim that the party represents the popular will, contrary to former political elites representing only their own interests. This claim is however contested by various social groups who took the streets to manifest their dissent with PiS policies (Kubisa & Rakowska, 2018; Ramme & Snochowska-Gonzalez, 2019). One such group were family carers providing care to children with disabilities, who occupied the Polish parliament in a series of high-profile protests in 2018. Another such group were women, who took part in several mass-scale feminist demonstrations in 2016 and 2020, coordinated by the initially informal organization ‘Women’s Strike’.

According to Bill and Stanley, social policy is the third domain after institutional change and traditionalist backlash, in which PiS governments have had the biggest impact (Bill & Stanley, 2020). Public support for families with children, especially those at risk of poverty, was limited before PiS came to power. Family and social assistance benefits remained highly selective despite modest broadening efforts (Polakowski et al., 2017). PiS introduced the child benefits program Family 500+ (previously just 500+), its most prominent social policy measure. Most studies discussing PiS’s welfare policies focus on this program, which introduced universal monthly child-rearing benefits of 500 PLN per child, payable until the child’s majority. A flagship promise of PiS’s 2015 electoral campaign, the benefit was initially only aimed at second, third and subsequent children and means-tested. In July 2019, 3 months before the October 2019 parliamentary elections, PiS made it universal for all children.

The adjective ‘illiberal’ in illiberal populism refers to the fact that this type of populism deteriorates democracy by stripping it of its liberal qualities – chiefly the separation of powers, the rule of law and the protection of minorities. In Poland, PiS has been “at the vanguard of creating a new political system; one which preserves the procedural vestiges of democracy while hollowing out its liberal content” (Pirro & Stanley, 2021: 13). PiS policies have notably resulted in a breakdown of the Constitutional Tribunal (Sadurski, 2019) and attacks on reproductive and LGBTQI+ rights (Korolczuk & Graff, 2018; Krizsan & Roggeband, 2018). The party uses welfare to legitimize these increasingly authoritarian measures. The Family 500+ program of child benefits was for example repeatedly mentioned during the dismantling of the Polish Constitutional Court, suggesting that the court might “block a program that benefits millions of Poles” (Polakowski et al., 2017, p. 16).

3 Data and Methods

The chapter is based on 17 semi-structured interviews conducted in Poland between September 2019 and January 2020 with academics, policy-makers, and practitioners with expertise in social policy. Only a minority of respondents asked to remain anonymous. The study initially aimed to understand why several attempts at reforming long-term care policy failed. As I did not ask interviewees if they consented to be quoted beyond the original study, all citations in this chapter were anonymized. The interviews were complemented by an analysis of legislation and official documents produced by the parliament, government, and political parties.

Given the ongoing polarization of Polish society after populists came to power, I initially avoided asking respondents direct questions about party politics. Those however came up very quickly in interviewees’ answers. My first respondent for example, a care expert linked to PiS, told me that, contrary to PO, PiS “understands poverty”:

PiS, they deal with the poor, the sick, they take care of all those people who have failed, whereas here [for PO], it's more of a business thing — every złoty is supposed to bring in three złotys, one for the taxes, and two for me. And if something doesn't [make a profit], that means you shouldn't go into it and invest in it.

Thematic coding of interview data revealed recurring themes that went beyond questions pertaining to long-term care reforms. All respondents spontaneously produced (sometimes very sophisticated) comparisons of liberal and illiberal policy-making, but some also insisted on legacies and continuities between the two factions.

4 Discursive Shifts and Stable Policy Orientations

The prevailing narrative characterizing PiS discourse is that no welfare reforms happened before PiS came to power in November 2015. Interviewed social policy experts not connected to the party contest this:

The claim that it was PiS that initiated social policy changes [in Poland] is a discursive manipulation. In the first decade [of the 21st century] there were many, many actions, admittedly not as spectacular as 500+, but altogether they marked a change in relation to the previous decade. […] To be more precise, things started to accelerate very quickly from 2012 onwards. That’s when new senior citizen policies, but most of all family policies, started to appear. […] Even before PiS arrived in power, parental leaves were extended, pre-school care was reformed, nursery care started to develop slowly, parental leave benefits for uninsured parents were introduced […]

Interviewed academics that served as experts for the opposition speak of a discursive appropriation of welfare by populists: “[Social policy] has been appropriated [by PiS] to such an extent that PiS de facto owns the discourse on welfare and everything else is almost reactive, other actors have to prove their credibility [to talk about social issues]”. During its pre-electoral convention in September 2019, the party’s president Jarosław Kaczyński announced that PiS was “building the Polish version of a welfare state”, which was also the title of PiS’s official party program – A Polish Welfare State Model, (PiS, 2019). Among other promises, the document announced free medicines for senior citizens, a raise of the statutory minimum hourly wage and a thirteenth and fourteenth yearly payment for all pension beneficiaries. Such electoral promises were then used to justify policy inertia in other welfare domains. As pointed out by an academic expert closely following disability policy in Poland:

When the 500+ program was launched, [family] carers wrote letters [to the Ministry of the Family, Labour and Social Policy] to have their case heard and they received [answers] like 'Yes, we do remember about you, but right now we have a lot of expenses and we are busy preparing the programs we promised people in the electoral campaign, mainly 500+, so your case will have to wait'. Not in those words, but that was the message, […]. And then a term in office passed and other very costly programs are introduced all the time [but nothing happens in the disability domain].

The same academic expert explained that PiS provoked other political parties to develop extensive welfare programs:

Social policy is now rather in a developmental phase […], as a matter of fact in these elections [legislative elections in October 2019] nearly all parties have various social policies that ten years ago no one would have dreamt of […]. [PO] even said that [if they win,] they are not going to abolish what was introduced by PiS but will add their own programs.

Those quotes illustrate the discursive victory of illiberal populists in CEE, who successfully challenged the (neo)liberal post-transition consensus. In Poland as in most CEE countries, political parties from across the spectrum were committed to cutting public welfare spending and privatizing responsibility for most social risks. PiS discursively challenged this stance, although policy reform did not follow, and the ideological underpinnings of welfare governance remained roughly the same.

4.1 Familialist Continuities

Familialism is an orientation characterizing, to varying degrees, most welfare states across the world. It considers that the family is the most appropriate site of provision, organization and financing of care for children and dependent adults. A rich social policy literature conceptualized different varieties of familialism, depending on the intensity and type of state support for the caring capacity of the family (Le Bihan et al., 2019; Leitner, 2003, 2014; Saraceno, 2016). Research usually distinguishes between unsupported and supported familialism: “In both cases, families are considered responsible for care and expected to provide it. Under unsupported familialism, policies do not recognize families’ need for support. Under supported familialism, families are helped in taking care” (Le Bihan et al., 2019: 581). Unsupported familialism occurs when public policies do not support the provision of care by family members and do not offer any alternative in the form of care services; supported familialism promotes family care (via monetary benefits and/or leave policies), but similarly does not offer alternatives (Le Bihan et al., 2019).

Family 500+ is said to be a paradigm shift in Poland’s social policy – a transition from unsupported familialism towards its supported form (Szelewa, 2017). Widening the scope of analysis from a focus on child benefits towards other social policy domains reveals however that not much else changed when PiS came to power. Unsupported familialism still dominated social policy in Poland: the family was expected to fulfil most caring functions without much support from the state. Long-term care has been characterized by relative policy inertia (Safuta, 2021), while the demands for more state support expressed by people with disabilities and their caring relatives largely ignored (Bakalarczyk, 2018; Kubisa & Rakowska, 2018).

After the 1989 transformation, all political parties in Poland adopted a familialist stance towards social policy. However, their familialism was fueled by different beliefs, and those variations explain differences in adopted policies. In order to account for the continued prevalence of familialism in Poland, while simultaneously taking stock of its changing ideological underpinnings, I introduce the two real-types of market familialism and nationalist familialism. Nationalist familialism is a form of biopolitics which views the heteropatriarchal family as the foundation of the nation. This type of familialism uses family policies to pursue nationalist natalist objectives. It subjugates the individual self-determination and reproductive rights of women and LGBTQI+ people to the normative imperative of the reproduction and survival of the nation (Grzebalska & Pető, 2018). PiS’s nationalist familialism explicitly excludes carers considered ideologically undesirable, such as single parents (who until July 2019 had no right to the 500+ benefit if they were not perceiving alimony from the other parent) or queer families (Polish administrations and courts routinely refuse to recognise foreign birth certificates listing same sex parents) (Knut et al., 2017, p. 16). Market familialism, for its part, is critical of state interventions in citizens’ welfare, as it wants a radical break with the state socialist past. This type of familialism taps into the caring and financial capacity of families to avoid public spending on social matters. When families are unable to fulfil welfare functions, their tasks should be taken over by the market. This type of familialism characterized PO’s social policies.

The differences between those two types of familialism are best illustrated using a concrete example. Poland has witnessed a series of proposed but never-adopted long-term care reforms, each party authoring projects aligning with the type of familialism it defended. The first proposal was put forward by an expert working group set up under the auspices of PiS in 2007. The document planned to introduce a social insurance against the risk of dependence on long-term care, but never went beyond the stage of a draft submitted to the Health Ministry (Safuta, 2021). When PO came to power, another expert group worked on a reform of long-term care from 2008 onwards. Finished in 2015 and later revised, this draft law planned to introduce publicly-financed vouchers allowing to pay for care services. The aim was to stimulate the development of a market of care services by increasing users’ purchasing power (Safuta, 2021).

The voucher proposal is an excellent illustration of PO’s market familialism and its perception of the desired interactions between state, market and families. After revision in 2017–2018 (in preparation of the 2019 parliamentary election), the new draft made the vouchers available only to care receivers without caring relatives or whose caring relatives were professionally active. The proposal did not intend to challenge the care system’s reliance on unpaid labour by female relatives. In the words of a PO politician who co-authored the proposal:

The voucher will go to those who want to combine work and care. Or those who can't care because, for example, they are disabled themselves. […] However, if a wife takes care of a disabled son, husband, then there is no need for a voucher, what would we pay that spouse for.

The family was to remain the main provider of care, closely followed by the market. The state only stepped in to financially support the development of care markets via publicly-subsidized care vouchers. Confronted with criticism from social workers questioning authorities’ ability to monitor such private care markets, authors clarified that the proposal did not intend to introduce market oversight by the state. Those markets were supposed to self-regulate through demand and control from families:

Social workers were distrustful of care markets. […] They said we wouldn't be able to oversee them, but I said that it’s not up to us to do it, it's the families’ job. Families will be the ones spending the voucher on this nursing home or that other nursing home.

Originating from PO’s camp, the draft law on care vouchers was abruptly rejected by the parliament during PiS’s second term in power.

However, PO’s previously fierce opposition to public welfare started to thaw already in the 2010s, way before PiS arrival in power. The second PO coalition government (2011–2015) initiated a transition from unsupported familialism to ‘optional familialism through the market’ – a family policy regime combining public support for family care (via benefits or leave rights) with support for care provision via the market (Le Bihan et al., 2019). A scheme encouraging the development of private crèches and other care structures for children under the age of 3 (“Maluch”) was introduced in 2011, and a parental leave benefit for uninsured parents (the so-called “Kosiniakowe”) in 2015. According to an interviewed PO politician, this policy illustrates the ideological change undergone by party leader Donald Tusk himself:

The leader, Donald Tusk, clearly said that he completely changed his view on social issues since he took over responsibility for the state. […] For the first two, almost three years [of PO rule], there were no family policy proposals, and then came the care leave, and so on. There was more and more of that.

  • And why? Did Donald Tusk have an epiphany?

  • No, […] he was getting rid of the illusion that the market would solve everything. When you read his texts from the old days, he believed that there should be as little state intervention as possible, that the market would [take care of] everything.

4.2 Racist Continuities

Contemporary political, social, and cultural developments in CEE are often explained with reference to the shared legacy of state socialism. However, beyond this historically short-term heritage, the region shares a longue durée legacy of (semi)peripherality. From the development of capitalism in the sixteenth century, Western states have dominated Eastern Europe politically, economically and culturally. Poland alone has successively been a periphery of the Prussian, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires (from the eighteenth century to the Second World War) and a semi-periphery of the USSR (from the end of the Second World War to the fall of communism) (Pawłuszko, 2017). It has now re-gained the status of a political and economic semi-periphery of the centres of globalized capitalism located in the Global North. In the domain of race and interethnic relations, this (semi)peripherality manifests as ‘peripheral whiteness’ – a condition of simultaneous privilege and subordination characterizing ethnic groups from the peripheries and semi-peripheries of global capitalism, which could phenotypically belong to hegemonic Western whiteness, but are often symbolically denied full access to its privileges (Safuta, 2018).

In 2006, during its first period in government, PiS introduced a simplified procedure enabling citizens of neighboring Ukraine, Belarus and Russia to work in Poland without a work permit, based solely on a ‘declaration of intent to hire a foreigner’, easy to register by an employer. Initially free of charge, such a declaration cost 30 PLN (about 7 €) until July 2022 and since then 100 PLN (around 25€). The aim was to encourage short-term inflows from neighboring post-Soviet countries to remedy labor shortages in agriculture and services. Over 95% of migrants who benefit yearly from this simplified procedure are Ukrainian citizens (Krajewska et al., 2015). PO-led governments maintained this policy and even extended it in 2011 to citizens of Armenia, Georgia and Moldova.

More generally, successive PO governments did not scrap the labor migration schemes introduced by PiS during its first term in power. Poland’s immigration policy denotes a stable preference for ‘peripherally white’ labor migrants from the former USSR. Besides the simplified procedure, peripherally white migrants benefit from privileges such as the work permit exemption available to holders of a ‘Card of the Pole’. Introduced in 2007 by the first PiS government, this document attests of the Polish roots of another country’s citizen. It comes with the right to a long-term visa and to work in Poland without a permit. Around 70% of all long-term stay permits issued by Polish authorities are granted on the basis of such a document (Leska-Ślęzak & Ślęzak, 2019).

PO’s migration policy has been described as technocratic, while PiS’s as ideological (Łodziński & Szonert, 2017). The ideological character of PiS’s immigration policy manifested in discursive manipulations, such as the deliberate semantic confusion between ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’. During a debate in the European Parliament in January 2016, PiS Prime Minister Beata Szydło for example declared that “Poland has accepted around a million refugees from Ukraine, people whom nobody wanted to help.” (Reuters, 2016). Conflating labor migrants and refugees, this declaration was part of PiS’s opposition to hosting refugees from war-torn regions in the Middle East and Africa, in the framework of EU-wide relocation quotas negotiated in September 2015 by the previous PO government. Despite such declarations, until Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there were no possibilities for Ukrainian citizens to obtain asylum in Poland, despite the Russo-Ukrainian war ongoing since February 2014. Possibilities for obtaining asylum in Poland opened only in February 2022, for Ukrainian war refugees fleeing the full-scale Russian invasion.

5 Conclusions

The literature commonly presents illiberal populism in CEE as a reaction to the perceived excesses of (neo)liberalism. Until populists came to power in Poland, political parties from across the spectrum were committed to cutting public welfare spending and privatizing responsibility for most social risks. PiS discursively challenged this stance, although policy reform in the welfare and migration domains did not follow, and the ideological underpinnings of welfare and migration governance remained roughly the same. I show however that illiberal populism is not simply a counter-thesis to a (neo)liberal thesis. Instead, it is a reactionary intensification of the unexamined ideological underpinnings of previous policy choices. Familialism and racism characterized social and immigration policies in Poland well before the illiberal turn. Welfare policies in Poland were familialist before PiS came to power. PiS introduced the racist preference for peripherally white immigration during its first stint in government, but PO did not abrogate it.

The literature on populism shows that populist radical-right parties view the (heteronormative) family as a key site of reproduction of the nation. The adoption by PiS of a large-scale child benefit program fits this observation. However, familialism is not the exclusive domain of illiberal populists. PO’s liberal conservative governments shared a similar familialist outlook, although their ‘brand’ of familialism focused more on the family’s role as the site of reproduction of workers/capitalist subjects. Liberals’ unquestioned commitment to the family as main provider and payer of care facilitated the later instrumentalization of familialist policies by populists. I introduce a distinction between ‘market familialism’ and ‘nationalist familialism’, useful to account for continuities and differences in the varieties of familialism represented by liberals and illiberals, respectively.

The standard assumption in most studies of the populist radical-right is that those parties oppose immigration. The Polish case highlights however that illiberal populists in CEE are not necessary hostile to all migrant inflows. Instead, they distinguish between undesirable, ‘culturally alien’ non-white (especially Muslim) migrants and ‘culturally close’ post-Soviet ‘neighbors’. Polish populists perceive peripherally white migration as a valued source of cheap labour and in this they do not differ from liberals.

This chapter makes an important contribution to the study of bordering practices presented in the book introduction (Vuckovic Juros et al., this volume). It details discursive moves used by illiberal populists to identify families worth of state support (the ‘right kind of family’ in the title) and migrants welcome within national borders (the ‘right kind of migrant’). The chapter shows that those bordering practices rely on distinctions predating the populist turn. This begs the question of liberals’ responsibility in the democratic backsliding of CEE.