scholarly journals Romantyzm polityczny Jarosława Jakubowskiego albo przepisywanie Dziadów (na prawicy)

Author(s):  
Arkadiusz Bagłajewski

The article analyses two dramas by Jarosław Jakubowski: Dożynki and Nowy Legion (New legion), which their author designed as attempts at updating the political frame of Mickiewicz’s Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve), (especially ‘Warsaw salon’), read in the context of the ‘Smoleńsk romanticism.’ The right-wing approach to Mickiewicz’s archdrama offers a diagnosis of the social and political divide (‘two Poland’) in the aspect of the clash between two worldviews: left-wing and liberal versus right-wing. Mickiewicz’s authority is supposed to strengthen the right-wing diagnoses, hence it is easy to spot the numerous attempts at instrumental and anachronic reading of the romantic legacy. At the same time, the analysed dramas show the importance and the textual and ideological productivity of the romantic paradigm.

2006 ◽  
pp. 54-75
Author(s):  
Klaus Peter Friedrich

Facing the decisive struggle between Nazism and Soviet communism for dominance in Europe, in 1942/43 Polish communists sojourning in the USSR espoused anti-German concepts of the political right. Their aim was an ethnic Polish ‘national communism’. Meanwhile, the Polish Workers’ Party in the occupied country advocated a maximum intensification of civilian resistance and partisan struggle. In this context, commentaries on the Nazi judeocide were an important element in their endeavors to influence the prevailing mood in the country: The underground communist press often pointed to the fate of the murdered Jews as a warning in order to make it clear to the Polish population where a deficient lack of resistance could lead. However, an agreed, unconditional Polish and Jewish armed resistance did not come about. At the same time, the communist press constantly expanded its demagogic confrontation with Polish “reactionaries” and accused them of shared responsibility for the Nazi murder of the Jews, while the Polish government (in London) was attacked for its failure. This antagonism was intensified in the fierce dispute between the Polish and Soviet governments after the rift which followed revelations about the Katyn massacre. Now the communist propaganda image of the enemy came to the fore in respect to the government and its representatives in occupied Poland. It viewed the government-in-exile as being allied with the “reactionaries,” indifferent to the murder of the Jews, and thus acting ultimately on behalf of Nazi German policy. The communists denounced the real and supposed antisemitism of their adversaries more and more bluntly. In view of their political isolation, they coupled them together, in an undifferentiated manner, extending from the right-wing radical ONR to the social democrats and the other parties represented in the underground parliament loyal to the London based Polish government. Thereby communist propaganda tried to discredit their opponents and to justify the need for a new start in a post-war Poland whose fate should be shaped by the revolutionary left. They were thus paving the way for the ultimate communist takeover


Author(s):  
Boris I. Kolonitskii

The article examines the cultural forms of legitimation / delegitimation of authority of the Provisional Government. Particular attention is paid to the personal authority of Alexander Kerensky, including rhetorical (persuasive) devices and visual images which underlay the tactics of praising or condemning him. As the main source, the article uses the newspapers of A.A. Suvorin, namely Malen'kaya gazeta [Little newspaper], Narodnaya gazeta [People’s newspaper], Rus' [Rus], Novaya Rus' [New Rus]. These newspapers are compared with resolutions, letters and diaries, and with publications in other periodicals. The study clarifies some aspects of political isolation of the Provisional Government in the fall of 1917. By this time, the propaganda attack on Kerensky was conducted not only by the Bolsheviks and other left-wing groups but also by the right-wing and conservative publications. The propaganda of the left- and right-wing opponents was significantly different but they had a point of contact: both of them created the image of the “traitor” who was unworthy to remain in power.


Author(s):  
Laurențiu Ștefan

In Romania, a highly segmented and extremely volatile party system has contributed to a predominance of coalition governments. Alternation in power by coalitions led by either left-wing or right-wing parties used to be a major feature of Romanian governments. Thus, until a short-lived grand coalition in 2009, ideologically homogeneous coalitions were the general practice. Since then, parties from the right and left of the political spectrum have learned to work together in government. Given the semi-presidential nature of the political regime and the exclusive power to nominate the prime minister, the Romanian president plays an important role in coalition formation. The president also plays a pivotal role by shadowing the prime minister and therefore influencing the governance of coalitions. She has the power to veto ministerial appointments and therefore she can also shape the cabinet line-up. Pre-election coalitions are a common feature, more than two-thirds of Romanian coalition governments have been predicated on such agreements. Coalition agreements dealt with both policy issues and coalition decision-making bodies and the governance mechanisms that have been in most cases enforced and complied with—until the break-up of the coalition and the downfall of the respective government. One very common decision-making body is the Coalition Committee, which has been backed on the operational level by an inner cabinet made up of the prime minister and the deputy prime ministers, which usually are the heads of the junior coalition parties.


2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthijs Rooduijn ◽  
Tjitske Akkerman

How is populism distributed over the political spectrum? Are right-wing parties more populist than left-wing parties? Based on the analysis of 32 parties in five Western European countries between 1989 and 2008, we show that radical parties on both the left and the right are inclined to employ a populist discourse. This is a striking finding, because populism in Western Europe has typically been associated with the radical right; only some particular radical left parties have been labeled populist as well. This article suggests that the contemporary radical left in Western Europe is generally populist. Our explanation is that many contemporary radical left parties are not traditionally communist or socialist (anymore). They do not focus on the ‘proletariat’, but glorify a more general category: the ‘good people’. Moreover, they do not reject the system of liberal democracy as such, but only criticize the political and/or economic elites within that system.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karina Bénazech Wendling ◽  
Matthew Rowley

Populism, like nationalism, can be found on the right as well as on the left-wing of the political spectrum. However, current political debates demonstrate how in recent years, nationalist and populist movements have advanced the preservation of Christian “roots” against a global cosmopolitanism. Right-wing populism thus tends to present itself as a guardian of Christian culture, or Judeo-Christian culture. However, there is a struggle over the definition and the ownership of this religious heritage. Whilst it is certainly possible to identify sources within the Protestant tradition that may legitimise support for right-wing populism, the questions this struggle raises often relate to particular intersections of culture, theology, perspectives on history as well as political thought. This special issue explores and critiques these intersections, employing theological, historical, and sociological methods. While the main perspective is that of cross-disciplinary reflections on the fraught relationship between Protestantism and right-wing populism, it also examines the evolution of broader connections between Christianity and nationalism through time.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 32-54
Author(s):  
Lars Rensmann

Germany continues to face an inter-regional political divide between the East and the West three decades after unification. Most strikingly, this divide is expressed in different party systems. The right-wing populist Alternative for Germany and the left-wing populist Left Party are considerably more successful in the eastern regions, while German centrist parties perform worse (and shrink faster at the ballot-box) than in the West. The article discusses empirical evidence of this resilient yet puzzling political divide and explores three main clusters of explanatory factors: The after-effects of the German Democratic Republic’s authoritarian past and its politico-cultural legacies, translating into distinct value cleavage configurations alongside significantly weaker institutional trust and more wide-spread skepticism towards democracy in the East; continuous, even if partly reduced inter-regional socioeconomic divisions and varying economic, social and political opportunities; and populist parties and movements acting as political entrepreneurs who construct and politically reinforce the East-West divide. It is argued that only the combination of these factors helps understand the depth and origins of the lasting divide.


1969 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen L. Evans

In descriptions of the political structure of the Weimar Republic, the German Center Party is usually grouped as a party of the “middle,” together with the German Democratic Party and German People's Party, between the left-wing Social Democrats and the right-wing German Nationalists. In the years after 1928, the Center showed an increasing disinclination to work in coalition with the Social Democratic Party and finally, under the leadership of Dr. Ludwig Kaas, the last chairman of the Center Party, broke completely with the Socialists. During the same years Heinrich Brüning, Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932, made persistent, though futile, attempts to find an acceptable coalition partner for the Center on the Right, hoping, among other possibilities, to encourage a secession movement from the Nationalist Party in 1930. Because of the rapid dwindling of electoral support for the other parties of the middle, very little attention has been paid to the Center's relationship with them. It is the purpose of this article to show that the mutual antipathies between these parties and the Center were as great or greater than its antipathy toward Social Democracy on certain matters which were vital to the Center's existence. By 1928, in fact, coalition with the parties of the middle had become as unsatisfactory to the leaders of the Center as coalition with the party of the Left. The turning-point in this development was the breakup of the Marx-Keudell right-wing cabinet of 1927. The failure of that government to attain the party's goals in the realm of Kulturpolitik, i.e., religion and education, confirmed the Center's disillusionment with the workings of the parliamentary system itself.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Gindler

The Left has been represented by various currents that have historically been very aggressive toward each other because they used different tactics and strategies to achieve socialism. Like many intellectuals, revolutionary leftists did not get along with each other very often. Since the inception of Marxism, which is the doctrine of communism—an extreme and distinctive flavor of socialism—the far Left has portrayed adherents of less revolutionary ideologies as enemies of the working people. The followers of evolutionary socialism—the Social Democrats—were accused by the communists of betraying the proletariat. Non-Marxist currents of socialism, such as Fascism and National Socialism, were excluded from the socialist camp and put on the right wing by Marxist-Leninist propaganda. Stalinist political science became a benchmark that set markers to distinguish between the genuine Left and the Right. This article shows the origin and historical background of the artificial shift of Fascism and National Socialism to the right side of the political spectrum.


2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 291-301
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Chrisidu-Budnik

The 1944–1949 Greek civil war between the supporters of the monarchy with the right-wing government and the left-wing forces with the Democratic Army of Greece resulted in the death of approximately 100,000 people and forced partisans and their families to migrate to countries of “people’s democracy.” It is estimated that the Polish People’s Republic accepted approximately 14,000 people (children and adults). The article describes the genesis of the conflict that led to the outbreak of the civil war as well as the increasing polarization of the Greek population. It presents the (political and social) complexity of the processes of emigrating from Greece to the people’s democracies and selected aspects of the organization of the Greek community’s life in the Polish People’s Republic.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 43-60
Author(s):  
Yechiam Weitz

This article examines the major changes in the Israeli political arena, on both the left and right, in the two years before the 1967 War. The shift was marked by the establishment in 1965 of the right-wing Gahal (the Herut-Liberal bloc) and of the Labor Alignment, the semi-merger of Israel’s two main left-wing parties, Mapai and Ahdut HaAvodah. Some dissatisfied Mapai members broke away from the Alignment and formed a new party, Rafi, under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion. They did not gain nearly enough Knesset seats to take power in the November 1965 election, but Rafi did become part of the emergency national unity government that was formed in June 1967, due largely to the weak position of Levi Eshkol as prime minister. This enabled Rafi’s Moshe Dayan to assume the minister of defense position on the eve of the Six-Day War, which began on 5 June 1967.


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