Religious issues in the “Good Change” political campaign of the Law and Justice party

Abstract

This chapter deals with the role of religion in the political narrative and the activities of the Law and Justice (PiS) party. PiS won both parliamentary and presidential elections in 2015. It was for the first time in post-communist Poland that one electoral list controlled a majority in both chambers of parliament. The unprecedented victory enabled a far-reaching and highly controversial political and legal campaign called by its architects a “Good Change.” The Conservative character of PiS and its good relations with the Catholic Church may suggest that the influence of religion and Church institutions may have risen in the years following the party’s success. The chapter has three main objectives. Firstly, it seeks to depict the role of religion in the political narrative of the “Good Change” political campaign. Secondly, it assesses the scope of PiS’s actual political initiatives concerning religious issues after the elections. Thirdly, it explores whether and how this narrative and the initiatives are grounded in social reality. The timeframe for the analysis is the period of the first three years of the PiS government.