Why My Parents Backed Poland’s Far-Right Party
The Postwar Generation Struggled. I Hope That the Newly Elected Parliament Will Bring Them Into the Fold
“Poles are idiots!”
“What are poor people going to do?”
Last October, just days after Poland’s most recent parliamentary elections, I listened as my craggy-faced 83-year-old father angrily shouted these words through the phone receiver in his apartment on the outskirts of Kraków. He and my mother were both distraught. Their party, the populist, right-wing Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, or PiS) of Jarosław Kaczyński had just lost its majority.
For Poland’s last three parliamentary elections, my parents have put on their Sunday best and exercised their democratic right to vote …
