Youth are also strikingly absent from the mass grassroots protest movement that has emerged in opposition to the current government of the conservative and populist Law and Justice party though this does not necessarily translate into support for the government.
Young people seem to have been massively swayed by an anti-establishment, xenophobic, and Eurosceptic discourse fueled by underlying economic resentments. At the same time, a rise in nationalist sentiments can be observed among the younger generation. To large extent, this is the result of the state’s ‘politics of history’ of the past decade. [...]
Rather, it is a phenomenon of ‘consuming patriotism‘ that has substituted historical consciousness among the younger generation, which has been fueled by the rise of populist rhetoric in the political sphere. It is not books or academic debates on the country’s history -history as a subject is in decline as testified by a continuing decrease of matriculations in the subject- that serve to imbue the youth’s views.
Instead, we are witnessing a process in which patriotic-historical symbolism has meshed with youth pop culture, a development rooted in the 2005-2007 period of Law and Justice’s governments. It is thus not surprising that many young people donning T-shirts with WWII resistance symbols or the national ‘eagle’ voted massively for Paweł Kukiz, a rock star who espoused anti-establishment populism tainted with nationalist-patriotic overtones.
More so, the governing Law and Justice party has tolerated or even supported attacks on academics and historians who disagree or are critical of the current politics of history. It has not condemned nationalist and far right youth demonstrations which have increased in frequency since Law and Justice came to power. Simultaneously, a worrying proliferation of racist hate crimes has taken place around the country.
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