The Life and Death of a “Populist” Party. Understanding the Trajectory of the Samoobrona Movement in Contemporary Poland

The Life and Death of a “Populist” Party. Understanding the Trajectory of the Samoobrona Movement in Contemporary Poland

The aim of the paper is to understand the rise and subsequent marginalization of the Samoobrona (Self-defence) movement in contemporary Poland. The Samoobrona movement was founded in 1992 by a group of financially over-extended farmers who combined into a single entity two legally distinct organizations, one a trade union and the other a political party. It became famous in the nineties through the radicalism of its members during the farming demonstrations. To everyone’s amazement it then succeeded in assembling a broad electorate and becoming one of the largest political forces in Poland. Totalizing more than 10% of the vote at various elections from 2001 on, it even entered the administration for a short time, before being brutally marginalized after the early parliamentary elections of 2007. Using original research based on interviews with Polish politicians, media content and archival documents, I examine the development conditions of such an « outsider » political group in a context of “transition” to representative democracy. Demonstrating the poor analytical value of the concept of populism, I show that the double structure of the Samoobrona movement, at once party-political and trade-union based, is the key factor to understand its “successes” and “failures”. By allowing the Samoobrona movement to operate simultaneously on various arenas, it played a decisive role in its recognition as a major contender of the competition for the definition and the representation of social interests in post-communist Poland. Nevertheless, it also prevented the movement being seen as a legitimate actor by other contenders and hindered its institutionalization as a long-lasting political party.