The principal driver of re-ruralisation is the rediscovery of the countryside as an attractive place to live. According to CBOS survey from 2015, just 18 per cent of Poles want to live in a large city, while 40 per cent think of living in the countryside as their ideal.[2] Contrary to the global trend of urbanisation, Poles started the 21st century by going back to the countryside. Material changes such as the ever-increasing ease of working remotely from home facilitated this shift. It is borne out in the numbers: since 2002 the proportion of urban dwellers has declined, while that of rural residents continues to grow. Currently 40 per cent of Poles live in villages and, if such a trend continues, by 2049 this figure will rise to 45 per cent of a population of 34 million (compared to 38 million today).[...]
The countryside itself is the theatre of a third trend: de-agrarisation. Despite EU money, rural areas are losing their agricultural character. Villages have less and less to do with farming land and are becoming a sort of rusticate Arcadia with peace, quiet, and nature at its core. While farming (at present) is still limited to the countryside, only 10 per cent of Poland’s employment is made up of agriculture – by 2049 this figure may shrink to single digits. At the same time for growing category of people, a small plot of land next to their house is an element of their lifestyle.
Finally the trend of internal migration means that wealthier, more highly educated people are starting to come to live in the countryside, while people with low cultural and economic capital go to the cities. Villages near dynamic cities become bedrooms, while places near attractive tourist destinations are enclaves for people searching for a summer relax or a calm life as middle-class pensioners from the city. Such colonisation results in rising class conflict. Especially if we consider that another growing group in the Polish countryside is that of the ‘NEETs’ (people not in education, employment or training) – people that are inactive in cultural, social and political terms and whose views, research shows, may end up on the extreme margins of the authoritarian political spectrum.[3] [...]
All those changes contribute to the unstable political and class relations that determine the balance of power between urban and rural in Poland. They create the structural context for populist mobilisation against various ‘Others’ (middle-class colonists in the countryside, rural migrants in large cities, economic immigrants and refugees in both environments), fuelling radical right-wing sentiment and activism. The best example in Poland is rising nationalism, which, stoked by anti-immigrant campaigns from the ruling Law and Justice party, heightens the risk of ethnic violence. Its combination of Polish nationalism, religious conservatism, anti-elitism, and attacks on those supposedly seeking to dictate to Poland about values and migrant quotas made Law and Justice the largest party in Parliament after 2015 election and is very likely to help it maintain its dominance in the forthcoming 2019 elections.
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