As Poland heads into the presidential election next Sunday (18 May), Andrzej Leder – philosopher and professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences – explains why right-wing parties continue to gain ground, not just in Poland, but across much of Europe.

In this interview, he traces the shift to a post-communist identity crisis, growing male resentment amid economic and social change, and a broader backlash against women’s emancipation.

The interview has been translated and edited for clarity and consistency.

I think we have two levels of this problem here. One is directly related to the history of Poland. Because the Third Polish Republic was established [in 1989] to a large extent in opposition to the [post-war] Polish People’s Republic, which was supposedly a left-wing project, or even a socialist one, well, to a large extent the dynamics in the history of the Third Polish Republic is towards the right. And you can always, so to speak, bid farewell: some are a little right-wing, then others are a little more right-wing, then others are even more right-wing. And this dynamic clearly exists. 

This is also a process that affects the entire Western world, and this can be seen, for example, currently very clearly in the United States, where women are much more likely to be Democrat supporters than men, who often vote for Republicans and Trump, and this applies to the young.

In my opinion, this ties in with, I would say, the dynamics of emancipation movements. That is, women are, over the last couple of decades, in an emancipation movement – gaining an increasing set of rights, political rights and social rights. This is linked to men simply losing their dominant position in society. 

And men actually find it very difficult to find their way in this world. Women, on the other hand, feel quite confident in their emancipatory struggle, with this sense of, I would say, injustice caused by former patriarchal oppression (which, by the way, still continues in many areas). At least some of them. While men are a bit unsure about what to do with themselves. 

And this often results, especially in groups that are lost in economic struggles (for example, the traditional manual professions), which collapsed simply when industry was moved out of Europe and out of the US, This causes a reaction, I would say, of rage. 

This could be compared slightly to the situation of the nobility and aristocracy after the French Revolution, which had to come to terms with the fact that they had lost their dominant role in society. Some of them started to make a pact with the bourgeoisie and entered the previous bourgeoisie, but some of them never came to terms with it and were the force behind counter-revolutionary projects. And it is this kind of counter-revolutionary project that part of the radical right is proposing to men – to get women back to where they came from.

I think so, especially in a country like Poland, the generational change here plays a huge role; for example, the fact that the power of the Catholic Church over ‘people’s souls’ is diminishing a lot. Women have always been more religious in Poland, connected very strongly to the Church and, as a result, the Church has largely also guided their political choices. 

Those generations that are now entering the political scene are less influenced by the Catholic Church, regardless of their personal faith and therefore also have a much stronger sense of their agency or subjectivity. Which doesn’t change the fact that it still only applies to a faction of women.

That is to say, it is not the case that all women are as active politically as men, for example. It is still the case that men are more active. But women’s participation is increasing a lot. And it seems to me that now in particular, when this political fight has become really sharp and indeed the stakes are huge, this has a mobilising effect. 

You can see that there’s more and more participation in general, and women in particular, though. But won’t women now resent the current political parties, which have promised them a lot and not done much? We simply do not know that. 

Well, I would go on to follow what I was talking about. That is, first, men increasingly feel like losers. I’m talking, again, about Western countries, and actually the Global North. To a large extent, it is the case that deindustrialisation has affected men to a very large extent, and in particular young men, who are often already the second generation, who either can’t find jobs, or find very poor jobs. 

Women adapt better to this kind of situation. Women are in this emancipation movement, which among other things reveals itself in the fact that women are generally better educated and simply win in very many areas on the labour market.

And finally, there is also this completely everyday thing, that is men, who so far have decided about very many things – in the area of the sexual market, in the area of procreation – they are losing this power, women have influence much more strongly in this whole area.

So questioning that movement, the backlash, triggers a huge political force, consisting of the fact that everyone who is a loser in these social changes so far, they think it would be appropriate to go back to the way things used to be.

There is (probably well known) a series, Mad Men, about the origins of the advertising industry in the US, but it also brilliantly parallels the relationship between men and women in the mid-20th century. And I think very many men would like to return to just such a world. That’s what Zygmunt Bauman called “retrotopia”. And it seems to me that this is the underlying dynamic that makes parties that preach this kind of return so hugely successful. 

The second such dynamic is something that I said earlier, which means that because no matter which parties you elect, they pursue neoliberal economic policies anyway. So, in a certain sense, according to some voters, the nation is unnecessary. These are Confederation supporters who become libertarian, and they vote. 

And the other part says: you have to just overturn the table and introduce a completely different nature of government, because democracy doesn’t solve our problems, so we are overthrowing democracy. And this is again the, let’s say, authoritarian section of the Confederation party.

This political sentiment is growing in all the countries of the West or the Global North, although, of course, they are not yet a majority either – that is, not falling into such total despair. However, many people are still very attached to the (generally speaking) functioning of society under democratic conditions.

Well, but assuming we think in such terms that these political processes that currently dominate will continue, then the effect of that will be a kind of counter-revolution. Well, a bit of what happened in the US with Trump. The dismantling of the whole social state, which in the United States started in the Roosevelt and New Deal era, after the great crisis of 1929, and which was based on a kind of social solidarity – building the kind of state that protects the weak. 

That’s what’s coming to an end in the US, and how it will look in Europe – we don’t know. But it could be that we will also be moving in this direction. 

Politically, there has been a very interesting alliance, this means an alliance of the oligarchy with the popular class against the middle class, or meritocracy. And this alliance may indeed completely change the nature of the democracy we live in. 

And such a black scenario, which has already been invented by Margaret Atwood and which has been illustrated in the series [The Handmaid’s Tale], is Gilead, which is the kind of theocratic state in which the domination of a relatively narrow and male oligarchy over everyone else, and in particular women, is already extremely institutionalised.

But let us hope that this does not happen.