A Post-Election Analysis of Palikot's Movement - European Integration

Przemysław Sadura - Photo and ©: Joanna Erbel

The Genesis of Ruch Palikota

An analysis of Ruch Palikota
(Palikot's Movement) has to
start with a description of its founder, Janusz Palikot, because it was his
individual initiative that brought the movement into existence. Palikot was
born in Biłgoraj, a small town in south eastern Poland, where he spent his youth before studying
philosophy in Lublin and Warsaw.
He had started writing his PhD on Husserl's phenomenology when the
transformations of 1989 led him away from his study. He took on a job in sales
and in 1990 he established a company producing sparkling wine, the Jabłonna
Company. With this company, he took over Polmos Lublin, one of Poland's biggest producers of
alcohol. After instating the company on the stock market, he got rid of its
shares in 2006 and devoted himself to politics. His fortune is quite
considerable -
at the moment he officially declares his assets to equal 40 million Polish
Zloty, but there is evidence that he has much more than that stored in ‘tax
havens’. During his business years he established connections to neoliberal
employer organisations: until 2005, he was vice-chairman of Polska Rada Biznesu
(Polish Business Board) and Polska Konfederacja Pracodawców Prywatnych (Polish
Confederation of Private Employers). Between 2005 and 2006 he had connections
with the Ozon Media Company, which was responsible for publishing the
conservative Catholic weekly Ozon, famous for its homophobic content.
Today it is difficult to decide whether that was his last business or his first
political activity. Some commentators accuse him of cynicism and interpret
these actions as a search for a place in the public scene: among integrist Catholics,
nationalists and the ‘generation JP2’[1]. According to this interpretation, when
his entrepreneurship ended as a financial and political fiasco, he turned to
the other side of the political spectrum after sensing an increasing social
need for a liberal world-view.


In 2005, Palikot joined Tusk’s Civic
Forum, Platforma Obywatelska (PO) and became a Member of Parliament. He
repeated this success in 2007. As an MP he led a popular committee called Przyjazne
Państwo (FriendlyState) with the goal of
limiting bureaucracy. It was popular with the media, too. Palikot was the
vice-chairman of PO's Parliamentary Club until
August 2010. During that time, he became one of the better known people from
PO: he became famous thanks to controversial attacks on the Kaczynski brothers’
Law and Justice Party, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS), and thanks to protecting a
liberal world-view. When developing his career, he focused on PR (he is still
advised by Piotr Tymochowicz, known for promoting Andrzej Lepper, the leader
of  Samoobrona – an agrarian populist
movement which entered Sejm in 2001 and was a PiS ally in the years 2005-2007)[2].
At the turn of 2010/11, Palikot decided to leave PO,
resigned from being a MP and created a movement of his own. Already in October
2010 he organised the first congress for his supporters and in the middle of
2011, he registered Ruch Palikota as a political party and became its leader.


In this year's parliamentary
elections, Ruch Palikota entered the Sejm as the third most popular party in Poland (10.2
%). It was a tremendous surprise, as even a few months ago there was no
evidence that RP could even comply with the election threshold. The last time
something similar had happened to newly established political parties was in
2001 - these parties were Samoobrona and LPR[3].
During the last ten years, publicists and analysts had been writing more and
more about a blockade in the
Polish political scene: after each election parties left parliament, but
new groups could not enter. This year's weak results of parties with a
post-communist heritage - SLD[4]
and PSL[5]
- turned out to be a similarly huge surprise. But RP is interesting not only
because of its success. For the first time in Poland's political system, we have
a party that openly declares a liberal approach both to matters of world-view
and to free market solutions. RP exposes mainly its world-view aspect, focusing
on a ‘moral revolution’. Up till now, no one in Poland would so openly oppose the
Catholic Church's presence in public life; no one would question the validity
of its financial claims and the right to influence the decisions of politicians
and Polish citizens alike. Even the post-communist left of the 1990's did not
have enough courage to openly confront the Church.