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Abstract

This paper examines narratives incorporating memory politics used by right-wing populists (RWPs) to justify their support for Poland’s coal industry despite contradictory factors. Using theories of populist memory politics, this research examines coal’s role in Polish history and RWP political rhetoric involving the coal industry. It concludes that Polish RWPs narrate the coal industry as a force against foreign oppression, drawing upon a paradigm where the Polish nation is the victim of a series of historical oppressors. This victim-perpetrator relationship is projected onto the modern Poland-EU relationship, with the latter cast as the current prospective oppressor. The coal industry is then security against the EU’s supposedly encroaching climate policies, though a potential compromise is found in “clean coal” technologies. These findings indicate the importance of nationalist historical narratives to Polish RWP rhetoric on coal, and broadly contribute to an understanding of the use of memory politics in populism.

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2024 Yvonne Pan

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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