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Abstract

Democratic backsliding is often accompanied by popular policy innovations which boost the incumbent’s popularity, leaving opposition parties in a difficult electoral position. We analyze the strategies available to the opposition in such contexts through a theoretical discussion of issue-based competition and an exploratory case study of Poland’s main opposition party Civic Platform (PO) during eight years of democratic backsliding under United Right governments. Studying the changing positions of PO in three policy areas (abortion, social policy and national memory and identity), we outline how the opposition can re-position itself to attract votes. We argue that backsliding, because it produces a sense of urgency, incentivizes opposition parties to shift some of their policy positions either towards or away from the incumbent’s – even on issues that are central to their political identity. Because backsliding unleashes an existential conflict that strengthens partisan loyalties, opposition voters tolerate some changes that go against their preferences.

Keywords

political parties democratization and regime change elections,public opinion,and voting behavior social welfare programs East European politics

In Poland’s general elections of 15 October 2023, a pre-electoral coalition of three opposition groups effectively defeated the Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość - PiS) coalition, bringing an end to their eight years in power and, potentially, to their politics of institutional takeover (Bernhard, 2021; Sadowski, 2024). The largest of the three allied opposition blocks – the Civic Coalition (Koalicja Obywatelska - KO)¹ led by the Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska - PO) – increased its vote by around 1 000 000 (to 30.7%).² On the other side, the ruling PiS’s list received approximately 400 000 less votes than in 2019, that is the previous general elections. Even with 35.38% of the votes and 194 Sejm MPs, Jarosław Kaczyński’s party could not form a government – not even in coalition with the far right Confederation Liberty and Independence (Konfederacja Wolność i Niepodległość).³ This victory of the opposition coalition – which together obtained 53.7% of the vote – was possible thanks to unprecedented mobilization by opposition voters, particularly the young: turnout among those aged 18–29 went up from 46.6% in 2019 to 70.9% in 2023, and 63% of these voters favored one of the three blocks in the opposition alliance (Dzieciuchowicz, 2023).

The electoral turnaround in Poland, like the high-profile electoral defeats of Donald Trump in 2020 and Jair Bolsonaro in 2022, as well as those of Andrej Babiš in Czechia (2021) and Janez Janša in Slovenia (2022), has shown that the opposition can win elections against governments that engage in executive aggrandizement. What can we learn about contesting backsliding from this success of Poland’s opposition in the 2023 elections? Analyzing the strategy of the main opposition party PO, this article theorizes the challenges that the electoral opposition faces in the context of backsliding from the perspective of issue-based competition. While much scholarly attention is dedicated to identifying institutional, coordination and discursive strategies that are more likely to be advantageous for the opposition – focusing for example on extra-institutional versus institutional strategies (Cleary & Öztürk, 2022; Gamboa, 2023), responses to incumbent’s polarizing political discourse (McCoy et al., 2018) or coalition-building (Selçuk & Hekimci, 2020) – the role of issue-based competition in shaping electoral outcomes has not yet been systematically analyzed. Although existing scholarship has assigned polarization an important role in shaping electoral behavior and party strategies in cases of backsliding (Chiopris et al., 2025; Graham & Svolik, 2020), the dynamic aspect of electoral competition and the ways in which parties change their issue positions over time has not been incorporated so far in this debate.

We argue that issue-based competition is important in the context of democratic backsliding because in many contemporary cases, incumbents combine executive aggrandizement with the introduction of new policies that diverge from the previous policy status quo and become widely popular. In such cases, opposition parties find themselves in the awkward position of having to fight against the institutional transformation spearheaded by the incumbent while an increasing number of voters are drawn into the incumbent’s orbit as a result of the latter’s attractive policies – policies that were often explicitly rejected by opposition parties in the past. How can these parties successfully adapt to this new political environment and win elections?

Using the literature on policy competition in multi-party democracies, we identify three complementary strategies that the opposition can use when reacting to the government’s policy agenda: accommodation, opposition and dismissal. We argue, first, that backsliding generates a sense of urgency and increases partisan loyalty on the opposition side. As a result, opposition parties have both incentives and space to shift their policy positions, even on issues that are central to their political identity. Second, we point out that these policy changes can be both towards and away from the incumbent’s policy positions. Accommodating popular incumbent policies helps neutralize the government’s advantage, but to increase their vote opposition parties need to take ownership of emergent grievances caused by the incumbent’s policies. To attract and mobilize voters, the opposition may shift their position further away from the incumbent’s unpopular policy, polarizing along a divide that is more likely to benefit them.

Our theoretical claims are grounded in an exploratory in-depth analysis of the changing issue positions of PO. The case of Poland provides interesting variation to analyze the dynamics of issue-based competition because Poland under the PiS-led United Right (Zjednoczona Prawica) governments (2015–2023) combined significant democratic backsliding with a considerable degree of electoral competitiveness underpinned by a vibrant multi-party system, a resilient media environment and a territorial dispersion of institutional power. Despite democratic backsliding, electoral competition in Poland could remain vibrant enough that campaigns would make a difference.

In what follows, we first discuss the scope, case selection and methodological approach of our study. The second section lays out our theoretical framework for analyzing opposition parties’ reactions to issue positions taken by the government in the context of backsliding. We then introduce the Polish case. After explaining PO’s situation in 2015, when it lost the general elections to the right-wing coalition, we discuss how PO changed its positions on three issues – access to legal abortion, social policy (focusing on the Family 500+ child allowance), and national identity and sovereignty – and discuss the implications of these policy positions for mobilization and electoral support in the 2023 elections.

Scope, Case Selection and Method

Our study is concerned with electoral competition in democracies experiencing backsliding due to executive aggrandizement, that is incumbents weakening checks on executive power and changing institutions to their own benefit in order to limit the opposition’s ability to challenge executive preference (Bermeo, 2016, p. 10). Opposition parties with a democratic commitment, which are the focus of our study, naturally will oppose the incumbent’s attacks on democratic institutions, be these instances of norm-breaking, illegal executive behavior, new laws, institutional reforms or constitutional changes. Although this part of the opposition’s political strategy can seem straightforward, Somer et al. (2022) observe that responding to institutional change sometimes poses dilemmas: How alarmist should the opposition be? What to do about those institutional changes that are ambiguous in terms of their overall impact on democracy, or purposefully bundled with changes that are popular? Without downplaying the importance and complexity of such institutional contention, we focus on the opposition’s responses to policies initiated by the government. Our goal is to explore this aspect of electoral competition that has been understudied in the context of backsliding.

Backsliding in Poland happened as a result of the incumbent’s efforts to undermine independence of the judicial system through new laws that focused on the Constitutional Tribunal, the Supreme Court, and the National Council of the Judiciary (Grzymała-Busse, 2018; Kriszta and Scheppele, 2018). At the same time, United Right governments also politicized public media (Allsop, 2023) and made efforts to centralize power in the national executive (Sadurski, 2020) and to control private media through purchases and legal pressure (Cienski & Tamma, 2020). The V-dem Electoral Democracy Index, which is based on experts’ judgment, declined from 0.87 in 2015 when PiS came to power, to 0.57 in 2023, when they lost parliamentary elections (Coppedge et al., 2023; Pemstein et al., 2023). On the other hand, in the two terms that the United Right was in power, they could not introduce the kinds of institutional changes that Orbán in Hungary, Chávez in Venezuela or Erdoğan in Turkey achieved in their first two terms – unlike them, PiS never had the ability to change the constitution. Their electoral standing was not hegemonic – the government’s parliamentary majority was narrow and, since 2019, it did not have control over the Senate. The fact that the government was a pre-electoral coalition of PiS party with, initially, two junior partners presented some further complications. The ruling coalition did not have mayors in any of the large cities, either. Scandals in state institutions – such as the so-called “visa affair” (afera wizowa) (Schmitz, 2023; Supreme Audit Office, 2024a) – were often publicly documented thanks to journalistic independence, internal rivalries in PiS, or chance.

Against the challenge posed by the incumbent, Poland’s civil society and opposition parties proved dynamic. The former marked politics with protest, while the latter went through changes in leadership, mergers and coalitions. The resilience of private media meant that the opposition retained means to reach voters despite being disadvantaged by the government’s political instrumentalization of public media and state institutions. As a result, elections remained competitive in Poland. The opposition won elections after the United Right had been in power for two terms, making Poland stand out among cases of backsliding where the opposition could defeat the incumbent in elections – in the US, Brazil, Czechia and Slovenia opposition victories came after the incumbent’s first term. While this makes the case fruitful to study for distilling insights about electoral competition during democratic backsliding, our case selection bounds the scope of our argument to contexts where the incumbent’s institutional and electoral power is not so overwhelming that the political arena closes down before opposition parties have a chance to adapt.

Choosing the Polish case also introduces institutional scope conditions into our arguments. Poland has a semi-presidential system and uses proportional electoral rules with moderate electoral thresholds in the Sejm – 5% for single lists and 8% for coalitions – resulting in a multi-party system. The existence of multiple competing opposition parties and the existence of smaller right-wing parties competing with PiS may be scope conditions for some of our theoretical observations. Polish institutions also have majoritarian elements, however: a powerful president elected popularly with a double ballot system and an upper house elected in single member districts with a plurality rule, both of which create a tendency towards bipolar political alignment. While some of the mechanisms we distill from our analysis of the Polish case can also be observed in backsliding democracies with different institutions, our single-case research design limits our ability to generalize to other contexts.

To extract theoretical insights from the case study, we conduct within-case inference through the reconstruction and contextualization of changes in PO’s positions on three issues: access to legal abortion, social policy, and national sovereignty and identity. The combination of these three issues allows us to discuss three different issue-based opposition strategies we elaborate on in the theory section – accommodation, opposition and dismissal – and to showcase several mechanisms through which backsliding may catalyze change in opposition parties’ policy positions. Our analysis, which is based on journalistic material, public opinion polls and other secondary sources, is primarily descriptive. To support our hypothesis that there were causal connections between backsliding and PO’s policy changes, and between policy changes and voting behavior, our case study points out some observable implications of these links.

Issue-Based Competition in the Context of Democratic Backsliding

The polarized political conflict that we observe in many backsliding democracies is not only about the nature of political institutions, it also revolves around issues which trigger passionate mobilization and contention in society. Examples of such contentious policy issues where backsliding governments have altered the policy status quo include the right to abortion in the US and Poland, environmental policy in the US and Brazil (Bomberg, 2021; Mendes Motta & Hauber, 2022), and the relationship between religion and the state in Turkey and Poland (Markowski, 2019; Yavuz & Öztürk, 2019). Whether this divergence in policy preferences between the new government and the parties previously in power is the cause or the consequence of the former’s decision to defect from the democratic bargain, polarized policy conflict has accompanied democratic backsliding in many cases.

In some cases, part of the policies initiated in the context of backsliding were both novel and popular beyond government partisans. This was the case of new social policies implemented by the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi - AKP) in Turkey and the United Right governments in Poland. Even if opposition partisans strongly disliked PiS’s Family 500+ policy (the 500 PLN of monthly child allowance), this new distributive policy was attractive to many non-partisan voters (Sadura & Sierakowski, 2023b). The same can be said about the lifting of the headscarf ban for university students and public employees (Çarkoğlu, 2010) as well as the healthcare reforms in Turkey (Yilmaz, 2017, pp. 156–7). When governments engaged in democratic backsliding at the same time offer voters some popular policies, opposition parties must contend with a new policy status quo upheld by a majority. This is particularly difficult for parties which had been in power before the backsliding episode since they failed to implement – and perhaps actively opposed – the popular policies now in place thanks to the new incumbent. In what follows, we lay out a framework to analyze the challenges opposition parties face when democratic backsliding is combined with such popular policy innovation.

Party Adaptation and Democratic Backsliding

Neither popular policy innovations by the incumbent, nor other parties’ need to respond to these, are specific to the context of backsliding – these are normal phenomena in democratic politics and have been studied extensively. In the context of Western European parliamentary democracies, scholars have found that on average political parties react both to major shifts in public opinion away from the party’s position (Adams et al., 2004), and to shifts in rival parties’ positions (Adams & Somer-Topcu, 2009) by changing their own policy position in the same direction. Leadership-dominated parties (as opposed to parties where the membership has decision-making power) also react to exclusion from office by changing their policy positions (Schumacher et al., 2013). Such adaptation, which is what rational choice models of electoral competition predict, can bring electoral benefits (Tavits, 2007).⁴

Major changes in policy position come with risks, too. A shift may not only win votes but also lose them, particularly if it risks demobilizing the party’s base. That is why parties that are more responsive to their social base are less likely to shift policy positions even in the face of changes in public opinion (Schumacher et al., 2013). Indeed, changing positions on what Tavits (2007) describes as “value-based social and cultural issues” can be electorally costly. Finally, parties face uncertainty as to whether the shift in policy position would be visible and credible enough to win any voters. Some works suggest that voters do not pick up on or are not convinced by the changes in party’s campaign rhetoric immediately (Adams et al., 2011, 2014), and that it sometimes takes a leadership change for opposition parties’ policy shifts to be acknowledged by voters (Fernandez-Vazquez & Somer-Topcu, 2019).

How does backsliding affect this spatial aspect of electoral competition, and in particular the evolution of opposition parties in response to a popular policy innovation by the incumbent? We identify two mechanisms connecting backsliding to sudden and potentially radical change in opposition parties’ policy positions: urgency and partisan loyalty. We argue that these can lead to far-reaching change even on value-based issues that are central to the parties’ identity.

When there is democratic backsliding, time works against opposition parties’ chances to recover power via electoral means (Capoccia, 2023): incumbent control over the media, systematic exclusion of the opposition from decision-making and legislation, the incumbent’s growing influence over the courts and electoral authorities and the erosion of public transparency gradually undermine the opposition’s ability to compete in elections. To the extent that opposition parties’ leaders perceive a risk that they may soon be locked out of power for good, they will act with a sense of urgency. If they are able to set the party program, they may make bold changes in policy positions in order to win elections sooner rather than later.

The second way in which backsliding may motivate a drastic change in the opposition’s policy positions is through its effects on partisan loyalty. Because democratic backsliding often comes with polarization and increased mobilization (Haggard & Kaufman, 2021; McCoy & Somer, 2024), major opposition parties have more space to shift policy positions. In times when political competition is not experienced as existential conflict, a policy shift may de-mobilize part of the opposition party’s base. This is less likely to happen during democratic backsliding. Even if opposition voters are displeased with some of their party’s policies, partisan loyalty will remain strong – the existential conflict over the direction of the state and society is likely to trump matters of policy for many voters.

Urgency and partisan loyalty, we claim, allow opposition party elites to rapidly make significant changes in their party’s positions – even on core issues that defined the party’s identity to date – in order to compete with an incumbent that is both engaged in backsliding and is offering some new and popular policies.⁵ But policy adaptation is by no means special to the context of backsliding, nor does backsliding mean that opposition parties will reinvent themselves in every way. Our argument is that through the mechanisms laid out in this section, backsliding can bring about unexpected and significant shifts in opposition parties’ policy positions – both towards and away from the incumbent’s policies – with important substantive implications for the country’s politics. Below, we discuss the conditions under which different kinds of policy change may help opposition parties increase their vote.

Issue-Based Strategies of the Opposition in the Context of Backsliding: Oppose, Accommodate, Dismiss

In the context of backsliding the government’s policy innovations are likely to be welcomed by diehard partisans of the governing party and will be disliked by the opposition’s core supporters. This is generally true, but the total size of these partisan groups varies across countries and over time (Laebens & Öztürk, 2021). There are always some weak partisans and centrist voters whose reactions to government policies will vary. To simplify matters, we assume that a government policy is either popular or unpopular with these more centrist voters. Opposition parties can observe how popular this policy is in different parts of the electorate and then react to the policy. Adopting, with some modification, the framework proposed by Meguid (2005) for analyzing mainstream parties’ reaction to niche party proposals, we suggest that the opposition can either accommodate, oppose or dismiss the government’s position.

We focus on the implications of the opposition’s response for issue salience and electoral mobilization. Who decides to turn out to vote is particularly important in the context of democratic backsliding, where high stakes tend to drive up mobilization. Indeed, scholars have observed an empirical link between polarization – whether it is understood spatially or in the affective sense – and mobilization (Harteveld & Wagner, 2023; Murias Muñoz and Meguid, 2021). We see this dynamic in Poland, where baseline turnout levels were low – around 50% in parliamentary elections until 2015 and rising to almost 75% in 2023 (Sas, 2023) – and in the US, where presidential election turnout went from 61.4% in 2016 to 66.8% of the voting-eligible population in 2020 (Fabina, 2021). To understand how opposition parties’ policy positioning affects voter mobilization in the context of backsliding, we discuss in detail the six scenarios described in the game tree below.

Opposition Strategy in the Face of Popular Policies

A popular policy innovation by the incumbent means that some of the opposition party’s existing positions are no longer advantageous electorally – this is the situation depicted in the upper branch of the game tree in Figure 1. Opposing a government policy that is popular with centrist voters makes little sense. Like in Meguid’s (2005) description of how mainstream parties’ reaction to niche party proposals affects the salience of the niche party’s favored issue, vehement opposition to broadly popular government policies can have the perverse effect of advertising the government’s achievement and mobilizing government supporters as well as non-partisan voters in defense of these policies. Yet, because there is likely a wide ideological or social breach between the opposition and a government whose discourse and actions intend to disable the opposition, or because their politicians succumb to wishful thinking, opposition parties sometimes dig in their heels and fervently oppose all of the incumbent’s actions – institutional abuses but also policy changes, even broadly popular ones. Such total opposition, although it helps mobilize opposition partisans in the short run by stoking up polarization, is problematic. By refusing to adapt, the opposition corners itself into the role ascribed to it by the incumbent: that of an unpatriotic, disconnected elite who do not want the good of the country and its people.

Figure 1.

Structure of issue-based competition between incumbent and opposition party.

It is more advantageous for the opposition to respond to the incumbent’s popular policy innovations by using the “accommodative” or “dismissive” strategies identified by Meguid (2005, p. 350). Accommodation involves adjusting the party’s policy position to adopt a popular policy or proposal made by the incumbent. Where ideological contradictions with the government are too salient to accommodate, but overt opposition is potentially disadvantageous electorally, the opposition can also try to dismiss the issues the government hopes to put on the political agenda by not talking about these and refraining from taking very sharp positions. Dismissal can also mean purposefully reframing an issue in such a way that it becomes a different issue altogether – one on which the opposition is more comfortable taking a clear stance. Both accommodation and dismissal are defensive strategies, however. They might help opposition parties stop further losses and, in the best case, de-mobilize government voters by disarming one of its strongest arguments – if both sides agree that they will keep the popular policy in place, it is no longer at stake in the elections. But accommodation is unlikely to bring new voters, nor does it help the opposition mobilize its own supporters. In sum, in this scenario where government policy innovations are largely popular the opposition can hardly gain electoral ground – at least not on the basis of its policy offer.

Government Policy Mistakes and Opposition Strategy: Opportunities for Transformation

Thankfully for opposition parties, governments engaged in aggrandizement also make unpopular policies. In fact, there are several mechanisms through which executive aggrandizement and the resulting backsliding endogenously lead to unpopular policies or bad policy performance, opening up opportunities for the opposition to take the policy initiative. The first such mechanism is that parties engaging in aggrandizement must maintain large electoral coalitions encompassing some ideological extremes as well as centrist voters. Depending on the leverage of the ideologically extreme actors inside the governing party or coalition – which in turn depends on their size, their institutional power, and ability to credibly threaten defection – the government may be forced to make unpopular extremist policies to maintain its cohesion. Such policies can trigger large protests from civil society, mobilizing the opposition and providing the latter with new legitimacy. Another reason why backsliding may lead to policy mistakes is that it often renders the law-making process faster and less consultative. Even though backsliding does not remove all constraints on the government, it implies that some institutional veto points are disabled, for example through the appointment of loyalists to formerly independent institutions. The personalism that characterizes aggrandizing governments can also cause policy mistakes through other mechanisms, such as the prioritization of issues and policies that do not carry wide electoral appeal but are favored by the leader, the prioritization of personal loyalty over competence, or the kind of leadership self-delusion seen in some dictatorships. A third self-destructive aspect of governance under aggrandizing governments is the frequent reliance of such governments on nepotism and patronage.⁶

The lower branch of the game tree in Figure 1 – where the government’s policy or position is unpopular with centrist voters – represents a scenario where the opposition has the possibility of expanding its base by vocally opposing the government position. This may not require the opposition party to shift positions: If it already had, ex ante, a clear stance on this policy issue, the government’s unpopular policy can give the opposition a new electoral advantage even though it maintains its stance.⁷ However, if the opposition party did not previously have a clear position on this issue or if its position was a centrist one, moving further away from the government’s policy may benefit the opposition by rearranging the electoral landscape. Especially if the opposition party’s identity allows them to present a credible alternative to the incumbent’s policy, a strategy of polarization can help them mobilize their own base, attract new voters and depress the government’s support by increasing the salience of this unpopular policy.

The importance of unpopular policies in moving electoral fault lines implies that opposition parties do not get the same opportunities in each case. While grievances always emerge over time, the timing of negative exogenous shocks and government policy mistakes will vary. These can happen early in the incumbent’s tenure – as COVID did for Trump – or much later, as the currency crisis and mass immigration did in Turkey. Since backsliding gradually closes the institutional opportunity window for the opposition, such policy mistakes may become harder to exploit over time, as media access, judicial independence and the independence of civil society decline.

Finally, opposition parties may fail to turn government mistakes into electoral gains. A first potential obstacle is ideological. For example, if the government is turning to austerity politics after a period of excessive expansion, an opposition party committed to fiscal discipline may not want to move against this unpopular policy. There may also be organizational obstacles to adaptation – accountability to party members or intense factionalism can make it hard for opposition parties to credibly shift positions. Finally, opposition parties will not be able to exploit the government’s failures if their claim to do better than the government in these policy fields is not credible either because they lack a good reputation in this area, or because their media disadvantage is already overwhelming and they cannot communicate the position change to voters.

We now turn our attention to the Polish case, which allows us to showcase the theoretical points made above. We first present the political context of democratic backsliding in Poland. We then describe important changes in PO’s positions on three salient policy issues and discuss how these changes played out in the 2023 general elections.

Backsliding and Policy Change in Poland

Poland faced a new political situation after the 2015 parliamentary elections: the PiS-led right-wing coalition won 235 out of 460 seats in the Sejm, the lower chamber of Poland’s parliament, as well as the majority in the Senate. Earlier that year, they had also won the popularly elected presidency. Thus PO, which had been in power since 2007 in coalition with PSL, lost its influence over both executive and legislative institutions.

PO had faced the 2015 parliamentary elections as a weakened party: in September 2014, its long-time leader Donald Tusk had left his position as prime minister after seven years to become the president of the European Council. In May 2015 Bronisław Komorowski, then the incumbent president supported by PO, surprisingly lost the election to Duda, a little-known EU MP from PiS. PO, in addition, had passed in 2012 an unpopular law gradually increasing the retirement age for men and women to 67 years (Sejm, 2012; President, 2012) and faced very uneven levels of unemployment among different parts of the population throughout its tenure (Ślarzyński, 2024). To make matters worse, Nowoczesna, a newly established liberal party led by Ryszard Petru, banker and former advisor to Leszek Balcerowicz, was competing, with some success, for PO’s electorate (Markowski, 2016, p. 1313). Standing against PO’s relatively uninspiring slogan “Silna gospodarka, wyższe płace” (“Strong economy, higher wages”) were PiS promises of fiscal expansion: the introduction of the 500 PLN child allowance program and backtracking the pension-age reform, reducing it back to 65 years for men and 60 for women. During the 2015 general elections campaign these proposals were met with skepticism from prominent opposition politicians who emphasized the primary need for fiscal responsibility (Debate, 2015; Rostowski, 2015). Such critical reactions were time and time again brought up by PiS politicians after their electoral success to showcase the imposybilizm (Papiernik, 2022) that led the PO-PSL coalition in 2007–2015.

The United Right government led by PiS kept their main campaign promises. The introduction of the 500+ child allowance after the 2015 parliamentary elections marked the end of transition consensus (Ślarzyński, 2024), which in political economy had been defined by a free-market subtext combined with a selective continuation of welfare state policies inherited from the times of state-socialism (Bohle & Greskovits, 2012; Kennedy, 2002). The new benefits, which had not been regarded as acceptable social policies beforehand, now helped the incumbent expand its support base (Sadura & Sierakowski, 2023a). This reality was difficult to come to terms with for a liberal party emphasizing the importance of individual achievement and fiscal responsibility – while the government’s policies were winning PiS greater popularity, PO’s support was declining.

Simultaneously, executive aggrandizement also created a new reality in post-1989 Poland (Markowski, 2019) by threatening the opposition’s institutional guarantees grounded in the rule of law and the independence of public media, as well as fiscal decentralization and the EU framework (Sadurski, 2020). Furthermore, the government’s ethnocentric nationalist ideology, amplified by its wide-ranging control over state institutions, discredited the EU project and reshaped the language of politics as well as the lens through which institutional reality was interpreted – not just for right-wing parties and their supporters but also for the rest (Kotwas & Kubik, 2022). In PiS’s ethnocentric and populist narrative PO, together with EU politicians, were the status quo that Poland had to overcome to achieve sovereignty and national solidarity (Cześnik & Kotnarowski, 2011).

Finding a language that would not advocate for PiS’s new regime nor for coming back to the discredited old one (Enyedi, 2020) was, therefore, difficult – the takeover of the institutions necessitated PO to defend the “old” regime, while at the same time accepting its economic shortcomings for the disadvantaged: those with lower skills, the elderly and inhabitants of middle-size towns as well as rural areas (Ciżkowicz et al., 2016). PO also had to modify its discourse, which often emphasized individualistic achievement, private ownership and the need for small government (Gabryszak, 2019). What is more, PO’s politics of history – incarnated most notably in three museums⁸ conceptualized and built under their governments in 2007–2015, as well as in commemorations connected with them – had been guided by an ambitious goal of making Poland a leader in promoting a multifaceted understanding of European history which included negotiation between CEE and Western Europe over the European memory of the Second World War and its consequences (Mälksoo, 2009; Snyder, 2005). The national-populist discourse by PiS branded this pro-EU and conciliatory policy agenda as unpatriotic and pro-German (Jaskulowski & Majewski, 2022, p. 466).

Figure 2 shows how PiS, PO and the Democratic Left Alliance (Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej - SLD)⁹ fared in the polls from 2000 to 2020. For over one year after the 2015 parliamentary elections, the support for PO trailed below 20%, dropping from the 24.09% obtained in these elections, but would gradually grow again until 2020. Against this background, we now focus on specific changes in PO’s policy positions.

Figure 2.

Declared support for PiS, PO and SLD (2000–2020) (CBOS 2021b, p. 4) (authors’ translation).

PO’s Response: Transforming Electoral Divisions through Accommodation and Polarization

Studies show that PiS and PO do not compete for the same electorate – the movement of voters between these parties, while considerable in the early 2000s, practically ceased after 2008 (Ślarzyński, 2024). Other works analyzing the vote transfer between 2019 and 2022 found a similar dynamic before the 2023 elections (Sadura & Sierakowski, 2023a, pp. 13–24). Assuming that the biggest opposition party was aware of this situation, we can say that PO’s strategy would focus on mobilizing its own sympathizers and de-mobilizing PiS’s non-core electorate, especially those voters which PiS acquired after 2015 thanks to its social policies (Sadura & Sierakowski, 2023a). Although turnout in Poland had been comparatively low after 1989, both the government’s and the opposition’s electoral strategy increasingly depended on mobilizing their social bases energized by polarization and a sense of existential conflict. Turnout surged in the 2019 general elections (from 50.92% to 61.74%) and 2020 presidential elections (64.51% in the first and 68.18% in the second round). Party electorates, meanwhile, became increasingly homogenous demographically (Markowski, 2020, p. 1520).

In what follows, we discuss PO strategies in response to three important PiS’s policies: restricting access to abortion, increasing social spending through the flagship Family 500+ child allowance policy, and implanting a nationalist narrative of national sovereignty and identity through state institutions. The reason we pick these policies is because together they capture much of the policy innovation made by PiS in this period, as well as the main elements of PO’s transformation. PO’s positions on other contested issues – like the EU, immigration or the rights of sexual minorities – were less affected by the transformative dynamics we explore here. Furthermore, the three issues we study allow us to display the three opposition strategies discussed in the theory section: accommodation, opposition and dismissal. Finally, these three policies stand in different relation to backsliding: the way PiS changed abortion policy was possible because of backsliding – the verdict was passed by a politically appropriated Tribunal (Pietryga, 2023, pp. 453–454; Bucholc, 2022) with the participation of three judges whose appointment was widely contested (Sadurski, 2020, pp. 102–112; Szwed, 2023, pp. 17–22) – while the 500+ policy was procedurally unrelated to backsliding. PiS’s politics of national identity were somewhere in between: such a discourse could have been adopted in the absence of backsliding, but the politicization of funding for civil society and of public media allowed PiS to impose this narrative much further than what they could have done in the absence of this centralization of power. Table 1 summarizes PO's changing policy positions on the Family 500+ child allowance and on abortion policies, which are discussed in detail below. These exemplify a popular and an unpopular government policy, respectively. Two further popular policies – retirement age reduction and the securitization of the Polish-Belarussian border against illegal migration – are presented in Table 1 as examples of the accommodation and dismissal strategies, respectively.

Table 1.

Policy Strategy of PO/KO Vis-à-Vis Selected Policies of PiS and its United Right Governments in the Field of Social Policy (Family 500+ Child Allowance and Retirement Age Reduction), National Identity (Securitization of Polish-Belarussian Border Against Illegal Migration) and Abortion (de facto Abortion Ban).

While our narrative focuses on changes in PO’s issue positions, several leadership changes also happened in PO in this period and should be noted, as these attest to the importance of the personal leadership of Tusk, who returned from Brussels to take up the presidency of PO in July 2021. PO had three other leaders between Tusk’s terms: Ewa Kopacz, a Tusk ally who took the premiership and party leadership from him when he left in 2014, Grzegorz Schetyna, a Tusk rival before his EU tenure (Pawlicka & Krzymowski, 2013), who replaced Kopacz after the 2015 electoral defeat and oversaw the party’s successful efforts to win back the Senate to the opposition in 2019, and Borys Budka, a politician closer to Tusk, who replaced Schetyna after the 2019 elections, in which PO was nonetheless defeated. Following Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski’s relatively successful 2020 presidential campaign and an internal crisis under Budka’s leadership, expectations grew that the former might make a move for party leadership (Wojtczuk, 2021). Tusk’s return in 2021 punctuated the crisis: PO’s popularity, which had been steadily declining following the 2020 presidential election, gradually recovered after that (see Figure 3).¹⁰

Figure 3.

Party electoral support, July 2020-September 2023. Source: CBOS 2020b, 2021a, 2022b, 2022a, 2023a (authors’ elaboration).

Abortion: Shifting the Policy Position to Polarize Against the Government

One of the clearest policy positions that PO has taken in the run-up to the 2023 elections is placing the right to abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy on their policy agenda (Kidawa-Błońska, 2021). This stance subsequently found its place in KO’s official 2023 electoral program (Koalicja Obywatelska, 2023, p. 6). This decision, taken in February 2021, is remarkable because it constitutes a clear break with PO’s once center-right, moderately conservative identity.¹¹

We argue that the shift in PO’s position on the abortion issue was the result of a conscious effort to attract new voters and mobilize sympathizers in response to a procedurally contested change in the policy status quo. We show, first, that PO’s policy shift came in reaction to widespread protests after a ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal – over which PiS had established political control (Sadurski, 2020; Pietryga, 2023, pp. 453–454; Bucholc, 2022) – produced a de facto ban on abortion. Second, we argue that liberalizing the party’s position on abortion was a strategic decision taken by the party leadership. The shift was not dictated by a sudden change in the preferences of PO voters or of the broader public but may have been motivated by increasing electoral participation by younger Poles. Finally, we present evidence suggesting that PO’s movement to the left on abortion raised the salience of this issue before the elections, contributing to mass mobilization and higher turnout favoring the opposition.

On February 18 2021, that is shortly after the verdict of the Constitutional Tribunal, PO presented their official stance on the abortion issue. In a document called “the Women’s Rights Package” (Pakiet Praw Kobiet) PO supported the right to abortion until the 12th week of pregnancy, provided that this decision was first consulted with a psychologist and doctor (PO, 2021). This announcement was preceded by an internal conflict within PO: 21 politicians from the conservative faction, among whom were Sejm MPs, senators and an EU MP, wrote a letter criticizing the party’s directorship for requiring unanimity on this issue and called for a referendum on the abortion law (Szpyrka, 2021). Differences within PO on the issue of abortion had surfaced before – a poll conducted among its deputies in 2019 showed that only 39.3% of them supported abortion on demand before the 12th week of pregnancy (Morawska, 2021). After announcing the document, its main proposer, Małgorzata Kidawa-Błońska, stressed that she was not for abortion but wanted women to have the chance to make decisions and not be forced to do something against their will:

PO believes that abortion is evil and should not take place, although if we want abortion not to take place in our country, certain conditions must be met. (…) Almost none of these conditions are met. Because the compromise has been destroyed, we allow abortion in exceptional situations, not on demand. (Kittel, 2021)

By 2023 the party’s position was less ambiguous: Tusk, perhaps concerned that this policy shift may not be credible for voters, stated clearly that to be on PO’s electoral list in 2023, candidates had to support the party’s stance on abortion:

So: abortion by the woman’s decision up to the 12th week. This provision is already formulated unequivocally in the Platform’s program. Someone will say: “it took a while, the Platform was not uniform on this.” In these matters, I will ruthlessly enforce my position in the Platform during the formation of lists to the parliament. (Szczęśniak & Chrzczonowicz, 2022)

Why did PO liberalize its position on abortion in 2021? While the protests against the Tribunal’s ban were of unprecedented scale, a time series of the public's views on when abortion should be allowed shows little movement over time. Figure 4 displays support for abortion from the 1990s to the present using data from CBOS polls. Overall levels of support for abortion under different scenarios are surprisingly stable, though there is an uptick in recent years in support for the unconditional right to abortion.¹²

Figure 4.

Net support (% who support - % who oppose) for abortion under different scenarios, 1992–2023. Source: CBOS, 2023b (authors’ translation).

Even if the broader electorate has not liberalized on this issue, it is possible that PO’s electorate has, and that a failure to embrace the cause might have led PO to shed support to the New Left, which was already for abortion to be allowed on demand in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. In December 2020, however, just after the court’s decision, half of PO voters were still in favor of keeping the abortion law as it was before the court decision and 15% wanted to make access to abortion more restricted than in the law (see Table 2).

Table 2.

Opinions About the Situations in Which a Woman Should Have the Right to Abortion. Poll Conducted After the Verdict of the Constitutional Tribunal From 22 October 2020 (CBOS, 2020a, p. 6).

	The conditions under which a woman should have a right to abortion should be…
	More restricted (%)	As they are in the law (%)	More permissive (%)
PiS (united right)	72	21	7
Civic coalition (KO)	15	50	34
The left (lewica)	11	22	67
Konfederacja	57	27	16
PL2050	15	41	42

Why, then, did PO change its position? While its supporters did not overwhelmingly favor liberalizing abortion policy with respect to the status quo ante, they were overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the radicalization of restrictions. We argue that the non-democratic nature of the policy change – which is directly related to backsliding – both motivated and justified PO’s sudden shift on this issue. Embracing on-demand abortion was an attempt at attaching the party to mass protests against what the opposition saw as an unlawful decision taken by a politically instrumentalized court. This language was explicit in the document attached to the Women’s Rights Package, which used such terms as “pseudo-sentence of Julia Przyłębska’s tribunal,” referring to the president of the Tribunal, and “violence and aggression coming from the state” while referring to the Tribunal’s decision (PO, 2021a). Tusk in his communications was also underlining the illegitimacy of its decision:

Throwing in the abortion issue and a pseudo-tribunal ruling on it in the middle of a raging pandemic is more than just cynicism. It’s political villainy. (Tusk, 2020)

Similarly to Tusk, Trzaskowski also emphasized the role of the tribunal in the sequence of events concluding in the change in the abortion law:

The sad gentlemen, headed by their sad boss from Żoliborz, who has no idea about real life, never had enough courage to simply vote through their sick solutions, as they themselves call it, “in the protection of life” in parliament. They were even afraid to take responsibility for this matter themselves, shifting it to the disposable “Tribunal” and its puppet “President.” (Halicki, 2021)

Finally, we argue that by shifting its position on abortion, PO was able to mobilize more sympathizers on election day. A post-election study found that opposition voters were motivated by emotions of anger and distance towards the government, in part explained by the latter’s “disdainful” treatment of women’s rights (Jaworska-Surma et al., 2024, pp. 8–10). PO’s electoral strategy clearly took this into account as it tried to keep the issue salient: their big pre-electoral rally on 1 October, right before the elections, was dedicated to the issue of women’s rights. The abortion issue possibly had an effect on mobilization efforts through turn-out-the-vote campaigns as well, some of which were led by organizations focusing on women’s rights and gender issues (Jaworska-Surma et al., 2024, p. 6).¹³

The success of PO at attracting the anti-government vote beyond its usual partisan base is especially visible among younger voters, whose turnout and support for the opposition was particularly high. According to Ipsos Late Polls, younger voters’ (18–29 years) turnout grew from 46.6% in 2019 to 70.9% in 2023. In this group, the PiS’s vote share fell from 26% to 15%, while PO’s vote went up from 24% to 28% and the New Left remained stable around 18% (Dzieciuchowicz, 2023; TVN24, 2019). The younger electorate had been becoming more politically interested and less right-wing over the years of the United Right governments, while at the same time also becoming less religious (FES, 2022, pp. 37–38). Before the 2023 elections religious values were an important predictor of intended vote choice in this group, with those identifying as Catholic and reporting an intention to have children being less likely to favor PO (Matevosyan, 2023).¹⁴ It is possible that PO’s decision to liberalize its stance on abortion was motivated by the age gradient already visible in the surveys before the election, with younger, more urban voters – which supported Trzaskowski’s 2020 presidential bid in considerable numbers (Exit Poll, 2020) – more in favor of liberalizing access to abortion (CBOS, 2020a). We can speculate that had PO not shifted its position, some of these voters might have favored the New Left instead.

In sum, PO’s move to the left on the abortion issue was a political decision enforced by the party leadership and was a result of the government’s radical, unpopular and procedurally non-democratic push for restricting access to abortion. This policy triggered strong societal mobilization, which provided an electoral opportunity for PO. By breaking from its past commitment to the status quo of restricted abortion access and taking a new stance in stark opposition to the government’s policy in the already polarized context of backsliding, PO could mobilize more voters.

Accepting the Transition: Accommodating and Outbidding the Expansion of Social Policies

PO very quickly accepted that the change in redistributive policies signals the beginning of a new political economy in Poland. Already before 2015, the PO-PSL government had legislated some new social policies (Rafałowski, 2023, p. 197), such as the significant extension of the paid maternity and parental leave (Zajkowska, 2020, p. 125). We show in the Online Appendix that the issue became even more central in the 2015 campaign, when PiS proposed the Family 500+ universal child allowance and retracting the reform increasing the retirement age. After losing the 2015 elections, PO even proposed its version of the Family 500+ that would include the first child also – a feature that was absent from the government program until 2019 (Schetyna, 2016) – quickly accommodating and trying to outbid the incumbent’s policy. PO’s politicians were also sometimes claiming, referring to their 2016 proposal, that the 500 PLN benefit for every child was a policy idea stolen from them by PiS (Rostowski, 2019). Going along this line, in 2023 Tusk started to assure voters that after winning the upcoming elections, PO will not increase the retirement age (Tusk, 2023), a decision that the same politician in 2012 was describing as necessary to prevent the “collapse” of the pension system (Tusk, 2012).

PO once again moved to accommodate the government’s social policies in May 2023. During PiS’s party convention, Kaczyński further exploited the electoral potential of its government’s flagship policy, announcing that if PiS wins, 500+ would become 800+ (Wroński, 2023). The day after Kaczyński’s announcement Tusk, during a meeting with voters, demanded that the increase should happen immediately, rather than being made conditional on PiS staying in power:

This 800 PLN, this indexation of the benefit of 500 PLN plus 300 PLN for next year, corresponds to what you lost due to inflation and higher prices. To close the bidding on this issue, I propose – and this is how I am saying “check” to Kaczyński – that we vote as soon as possible to adopt the decision on the indexation of 500 plus; two – that we do it before the elections. (...) I knew for sure that if we said “800,” Kaczyński would say more, because he wanted to win the elections with this money, with the help of Polish children, and not to help the children. (Czerwiński, 2023)

In the end the increase passed through the Sejm and Senate with support from both PiS and PO, and was signed by Duda on 7 August 2023, two months before the elections (Krawczyk & Sławiński, 2023).

This shows how PO under Tusk changed its strategy from the 2019 parliamentary elections. Back then, even though PO had already accepted the Family 500+ and welfare policies figured extensively in their program (Rafałowski, 2023, p. 207), the party had focused on emphasizing PiS’s undemocratic policies (Borowiec, 2021). Delegitimizing the PiS government as undemocratic, however, did not demobilize the right-wing electorate (Sadura & Sierakowski, 2023b). In 2023, while still talking about the government’s corruption affairs and unconstitutional policies, PO competed with PiS in social policy proposals by not only matching its offer – emphasized by the slogan “Nothing given will be taken away” (“Nic co dane, nie zostanie zabrane”) – but also bidding up adding their own policy by proposing babciowe, a benefit of 1500 PLN per month for childcare for a mother that comes back to work after maternity leave (Koalicja Obywatelska, 2023). While we cannot know exactly how much PO’s policy change on the issues of the child allowance and the retirement age affected the 2023 election results, we do know that these were very important issues for some part of the PiS electorate (Sadura & Sierakowski, 2023a). Had PO not done its best to credibly commit to maintaining these policies, PiS could have better mobilized the voters angered by the prospect of losing benefits.

PO accepting these changes in the economic regime raises questions as to whether this shift was a result of PiS’s policies or simply a continuation of the trend that had started in the last years of the PO-PSL government already. The fact that many free-market oriented voters decided to vote for Nowoczesna instead of PO in 2015 would support the latter possibility (Markowski, 2016). Figure 5 shows that although government spending on family benefits under the PO-PSL governments indeed grew, it skyrocketed after 2015 with the introduction of the Family 500+ program, and later with its extension to the first child. PO’s wholesale adoption of these new policies, therefore, is more than just the continuation of an earlier trend. Furthermore, PO’s flagship family policies before 2015 and after 2023 are different from 800+ in that they are conditional on or incentivize women’s employment – for example maternity benefits, increasing the number of kindergartens and, most recently, babciowe. Nothing suggests that PO would have adopted a universal cash transfer policy if PiS had not done so. In June 2023, shortly after Tusk had matched Kaczyński’s 800+ proposal, almost 80% of PO’s supporters wanted to either eliminate 500+ (32%) or limit its scope to those that need it most (47%) (Machowski, 2023). It is very likely that in the absence of backsliding this and other social policy issues – rather than existential questions about the orientation of the regime – would have been at the center of politics, making such policy shifts potentially costly for PO.

Figure 5.

Public expenditure on family by type of expenditure (total cash and in kind) in % of GDP, 1990–2019 (OECD, 2024).

Negotiating National Sovereignty and Identity

One of the important changes made by the United Right in Poland’s politics is an explicit emphasis by state institutions on a political project of pursuing national sovereignty. This project has a strong international dimension rooted in the idea of the “regional hegemon” and the modern understanding of the “national freedom” (Anderson, 2006, p. 7; Kozłowski, 2023). A blueprint for this approach has been Viktor Orbán’s position in Hungary which allowed him a certain freedom to maneuver between the EU, China and the Russian Federation, all the while carrying out successful executive aggrandizement in Hungary (Magyar, 2016). PiS’s “Great Poland” project also has a cultural dimension in its traditionalist, nostalgic and victimhood nationalism (Kotwas & Kubik, 2022). The revolutionary character of the policy goals set up by PiS’s government is embodied in the images of Poland being destined to become a regional military and economic power – promises and predictions backed by projects such as the building of the Central Communication Port, the establishment of a national champion company in the form of Orlen, a powerful public energy group, as well as an explicit discourse emphasizing that Poland has been held down and victimized by other nations.

In PiS’s discourse the opposition’s questioning of the future grandeur of Poland on the grounds of its relatively smaller potential is tantamount with thinking “small,” being unpatriotic and serving foreign powers. The extent to which acceptance of this political project is limited to PiS’s electorate or is more broadly accepted “new normal” is an object of debate (Matyja, 2018). Undisputable, however, is the spike in the supply of national symbolism in the public space funneled through state-funded media in 2015–2023 (Kotwas & Kubik, 2019), as well the awareness of opposition parties that an outright rejection of the “patriotic story” would be politically very costly. This patriotic discourse was made even more hegemonic due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the escalation of the war in Ukraine in 2022, both requiring the opposition to take a national unity stance. It is also from within this discourse that media attacks on Tusk, who came back to Polish politics in 2021, were framed, by branding him as a politician serving the interests of Germany and Russia.

PO’s answer to PiS’s “sovereignty discourse” (Demo, 2005, pp. 294–295) has differed over time and depended on the situation. Earlier, PO was more openly criticizing the government for its radical anti-German stance (Budka, 2021). After Tusk’s return, PO refrained from a wholesale criticism of PiS’s nationalist stance in international relations. On many occasions, PO did not counter outright the emphasis on Poland’s victimhood, implicitly accepting in this way that the political context has changed. On the other hand, Tusk’s party has been emphasizing a different concept of national sovereignty, one more rooted in the integration with the broader international community through the EU and NATO.

PiS clearly tried to set traps for PO and Tusk to provoke an “unpatriotic” reaction from the opposition, hoping in this way to discredit it. The Appendix provides a detailed account of several such attempts. One example we provide was the government’s attempt to revive a controversy around the Smoleńsk catastrophe – the 2010 plane crash which killed 96 passengers, including President Lech Kaczyński, at the time when the PO-PSL government was in power. In April 2022, using the context of the war in Ukraine PiS politicians argued that the crash was an attempt by a Russian-German alliance to destroy the “pro-independence” Polish political elite (Macierewicz, 2022). A second example was the government’s announcement on 1 September 2022, the anniversary of the 1939 German invasion, that Poland will pursue reparations from Germany for the Second World War. The opposition, after some wavering, presented a common position in support of PiS’s effort to pursue reparations, while also expressing skepticism that the government could ever succeed (Onet, 2022). PO’s strategy under Tusk, as well Trzaskowski’s strategy in Warsaw, has been to try to appropriate patriotic symbols and memory. PO followed this strategy of fighting back against the label of “unpatriotic” also on the critical issue of the judicial reforms demanded by the EU. While firmly criticizing PiS’s inability to unblock EU COVID recovery funds held up because of the rule of law conditionality (Schapelle and Morijn, 2024), PO sought to appear as putting Poland’s interest over its partisan goals by helping pass a PiS bill that might have been able to achieve the required reform (Głowacki, 2023; Szułdrzyński, 2023).

Finally, in 2023 PiS devised a referendum to be held simultaneously with the parliamentary elections. The government, despite proposing the questions, phrased these in such a way that they would campaign for a “No” vote. The two questions on immigration in particular – “Do you support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa under the forced relocation mechanism imposed by the European bureaucracy?” and “Do you support the elimination of the barrier on the border between the Republic of Poland and the Republic of Belarus?” – could incite the opposition to take an unpopular pro-immigration stance or contradict itself.¹⁵ PO dismissed the referendum as a PiS ploy to finance its electoral campaign from public money, without taking a clear stance on whether voters should take part in it. Tusk, instead, emphasized that the real referendum was on the future government of Poland and the implications of this choice (Jurczak, 2023). In the end, despite the record turnout of 74.38%, the referendum failed to pass the 50% turnout threshold as opposition voters mobilized to selectively withdraw from participating. These examples show that PO has been consciously walking a line that mixes dismissal, accommodation and opposition in countering PiS’s discourse to reject the role of the “political camp of national treason” (obóz zdrady narodowej) (Polsatnews, 2023) they were meant to assume in the government’s playbook.

The opposition’s successful mobilization was not due to these policy contests alone. PiS made a series of consequential mistakes, such as Duda’s announcement of his approval for the law that would allow a political trial of Tusk by a parliamentary committee just before a planned opposition rally. It is thanks to Duda that KO’s June 4^th rally in Warsaw ended up being possibly the largest in the country since the transition to democracy (Rogowska, 2023). There were also other policy blunders, such as the mismanaged tax reform of 2022 (Supreme Audit Office, 2024b). Relatively high inflation in the years running up to the elections – 14.4% in 2022 and 11.4% in 2023 (GUS, 2025) – may also have contributed to anti-incumbent sentiment.

Local government was another very important ingredient in PO’s success. The support Warsaw mayor Trzaskowski obtained as presidential candidate in 2020 was in part due to the mobilization of a growing urban base of younger voters (Exit Poll, 2020) – the 2023 elections were a continuation of that trend and brought those new voters to PO.16 In addition, local governments, which provide financing and autonomy, were an important space for the opposition to apply new ideas. One example of policy experimentation by local governments was the financing of in-vitro procedures by many cities in Poland, including for example Warsaw and Poznań, after PiS had terminated state financing of this procedure in 2016. The financing of in-vitro procedures also made its way into KO’s 2023 election pledges (Koalicja Obywatelska, 2023). Many cities in Poland controlled by the opposition mayors also made transport free for everyone on election day (Portal Samorządowy, 2023) and made it more convenient for those registered outside their place of residence to move their voter registration, encouraging especially students to do so (Wysocki, 2023). This move counterbalanced PiS strategy of making it easier for their constituency to participate in elections: in 2023 people above 60 and citizens with disabilities could use public transport for free on election day (Balcer, 2023). Mobilization as well as credible policy change might have been more difficult to achieve had PO not held local governments in major cities.

Conclusion

We argued in this article that the context of backsliding introduces two dynamics to issue-based competition. First, it makes adaptation more urgent for opposition parties, motivating them to make significant changes in some of their issue positions, including on those cultural and value-based issues designated as “principled issues” by Tavits (2007). Second, because polarization – through its effect on mobilization – is a potential driver of support for the opposition as well as for the incumbent in the context of backsliding, opposition success requires combining policy convergence on some issues with policy divergence on others: polarizing the conflict by moving further away from an unpopular government policy can increase the salience of the government’s policy failure and give opposition voters more reason to turn out on election day. We argued that in the Polish case, the main opposition party PO benefitted electorally from accommodating popular policies like the Family 500+ while at the same time moving away from the incumbent’s position to polarize on the abortion issue.

The Polish experience suggests that opposition parties may have a better chance of winning elections if, rather than digging their heels in into their past policy positions and freezing the electoral cleavages, they change some of their policy positions in order to apply a mixed strategy of selective accommodation and selective opposition. Policy strategies available to opposition parties facing executive aggrandizement depend on the resources they have and the public opinion landscape they face. Where governments make policy mistakes or use their institutional power to push for policies that have little support – like the United Right government did in Poland on the abortion issue – it is easier for the opposition to turn the political agenda to their advantage. More research is needed – including in the Polish case – to firmly establish causal links between government policy, opposition strategy and electoral outcomes in the context of democratic backsliding.

Approaching the electoral politics of backsliding from an issue-based perspective reveals that regime contestation can leave an important policy legacy that outlasts the episode of backsliding. Opposition actors also contribute to long-term policy transformation when they make bold changes to their identity and program in response to the threat of being locked out of power. The Polish case provides a good example: PiS was defeated in 2023, but part of its political legacy will live on in the foreseeable future because some of their policy innovations, most notably in social policy, have been accepted by other actors as well. PiS’s long-term legacy is less clear when it comes to reproductive rights, but their interference with the law will likely result in this issue remaining salient over the next electoral cycle. In Poland, as in other countries that have experienced backsliding, it is the challenge of liberal democratic political elites to go beyond populist exhortations as they try to win elections, and to turn the threat to the democratic regime into an opportunity for improving on the previous policy status quo.

The case of PO also underlines the importance of leadership initiative and skill in forging opposition success. Although PO is an institutionalized party, its election strategy might have been different had Tusk not come back to take up the party leadership. Furthermore, politicians’ resources and persona shape their ability to embody a given strategy. Without Trzaskowski, PO’s move to the left on abortion may have brought less voters, and without Tusk’s ability to reassure PO’s core electorate, the party’s shifts on social policy may have led to more vote loss. Indeed, while our article emphasizes opposition parties’ objective policy positions and strategic interests, these have little importance unless the party leadership can effectively communicate them to both their core voters and the new voters they hope to recruit.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Opposing Backsliding Through Policy Competition: The Case of Poland’s Civic Platform (2015–2023)

Supplemental Material for Opposing Backsliding Through Policy Competition: The Case of Poland’s Civic Platform (2015–2023) by Melis G. Laebens and Marcin Ślarzyński in Comparative Political Studies

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We thank our discussants Fernando Bizzarro, Marek Naczyk and Fernando Casal Bertoa, as well as other participants of the “Back from the Brink” conferences at Yale University (April 2023) and the University of Oxford (November 2023), and of the Rooftop Seminar at the CEU Democracy Institute (November 2023). We also thank Giovanni Capoccia and Isabela Mares for their comments and guidance.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the National Science Center Poland (NCN) [grant number 2022/47/D/HS5/03185], PI: Melisse Laebens.

ORCID iDs

Melis G. Laebens

Marcin Ślarzyński

Data Availability Statement

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author Biographies

Melis G. Laebens is assistant professor of political science at the Central European University in Vienna and at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Her research focuses on democratic backsliding, party politics and voter behavior. She holds a grant from the National Science Center, Poland dedicated to the changing lines of political conflict during democratic backsliding in Turkey and Poland.

Marcin Ślarzyński is an assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. He studies political and social change in Europe, with the special focus on Poland, through the prism of political sociology, cultural sociology and political economy. Currently he is a co-PI in the project “Conservative Mobilizations: Intellectuals, Social Movements, and the State” which is co-financed by the Polish Academy of Sciences and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

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