A large-scale ethnography of populism in the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Grant agreement no. 822682 H2020-SC6-GOVERNANCE-2018 Final Report WP 2 – Participatory Online Conversation Due date of deliverable: Month 48 Actual submission date: 30/12/2022 Start date of project: 1 January 2019 Duration: 48 months Lead beneficiary for this deliverable: EDGE Last editors: Veronica Davidov and Jan Kubik Contributors: Alberto Cottica, Veronica Davidov, Magdalena Góralska, Jiří Kocián, Jitka Králová, Jan Kubik, Richard Mole, Santos Rivera-Cardona, Djan Sauerborn, Zdeněk Sloboda, Wojciech Szymański Dissemination Level PU Public PP Restricted to other programme participants (including the Commission Services) RE Restricted to a group specified by the consortium (including the Commission Services) CO Confidential, only for members of the consortium (including the Commission Services) Deliverable D2.7 Page 1 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe History table Version Date Released by Comments V1 December 2022 Edgeryders None Deliverable D2.7 Page 2 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Table of contents History table 2 Table of contents 3 Key word list 6 Definitions and acronyms 6 Executive Summary 7 1. Introduction 11 1.1. The Ethnographic Sensibility 15 1.2. Project background and context 17 1.2.1. Designing new digital ethnographies in Czechia, Germany, and Poland 17 1.2.1.1. The comparative basis of the three country-specific fieldworks 19 1.2.1.2. The Czech fieldwork 21 1.2.1.3. The Polish fieldwork 27 1.2.1.4. The German fieldwork 32 1.2.2. Ethnographic coding: Generating the secondary data and re-building the codebook 33 1.2.3. Data 36 1.2.5. Mixed methods at work 38 1.2.6. Accounting for gender 40 1.3. The Process 40 2. Results 42 3.1. POLISH CASE 42 3.1.1. The Pandemic Context 42 3.1.1.1. Ethnographic fieldwork in Poland in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic 42 3.1.1.2. Social response to pandemic restrictions 43 3.1.1.3. Conducting ethnographic fieldwork during the pandemic in Poland 44 3.1.2. Political and economic context 45 Deliverable D2.7 Page 3 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe 3.1.3. Polarisation, antagonism, division? Narratives on the condition of Polish society 48 3.1.3.1. Narratives of differences and divisions 49 3.1.3.2. Social antagonisms and polarisation 55 3.1.3.3. Alienation, individualism, collectivism 60 3.1.4. Tales of an ideal state: politics, citizenship, values 61 3.1.4.1. Conceptions of an ideal state 62 3.1.4.2. Politicians and the ideal of political culture 64 Ideal political culture 64 Values, politics, and the politics of values: freedom 65 3.1.4.3. Political disillusionment 79 3.1.4.4. Towards a summary: trust and mistrust 86 3.1.5. Network analysis and visualisation summary 88 3.2. CZECH CASE 90 3.2.1. The Pandemic Context 90 3.2.2. Political Disillusionment 92 3.2.2.1. “Disillusionment” in the ethnographic context 92 3.2.2.2. Historical context 94 3.2.2.3. Re-politicisation in times of crisis 98 3.2.3. Subjectivity and affect as voting determinants 103 3.2.3.1. The role of affect and subjectivities in political choices 103 3.2.3.2. Fear, anxiety, distrust 109 3.2.4. Romanticization of history, declinism and (anti-)nostalgia 116 3.2.4.1. The role of history in fueling populist sentiments 116 3.2.4.2. The Nation in Opposition 116 3.2.4.3. Declinism 119 3.2.4.4. The postsocialist (anti)-nostalgia 124 3.2.5. Network analysis and visualisations summary 127 Visualisations support the ethnographic insights 127 Visualisations nuance the ethnographic insights 127 Visualisations complement the ethnographic insights 128 For further investigation 128 Deliverable D2.7 Page 4 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe 3.3. GERMAN CASE 128 3.3.1. The Pandemic Context 128 3.3.1.1. General trajectory and government response 128 3.3.1.2. Cultural Climate around Covid: Conspiracy myths’ driven populism 130 3.3.2. The politics of affect 132 3.3.3. Distrust of scientific expertise/anti-vax sentiment 138 3.3.4. Retraditionalisation of gender roles 144 3.3.5. Network analysis and visualisations summary 150 3.4. Key findings and conclusions 152 3.4.1. The Czech Republic: 152 3.4.2. Poland: 153 3.4.3. Germany: 154 3.4.4. Comparative insights based on key findings 155 4. Policy recommendations 158 5. Bibliography 162 Deliverable D2.7 Page 5 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Key word list Affect Anti-vaxxers Anthropology Communist nostalgia and anti-nostalgia Coding COVID-19 Czechia (The Czech Republic) Data visualisation Declinism Digital ethnography Distrust Ethnography Freedom Gender Germany Mixed methods approach Nationalism Poland Polarisation Political ethnography Populism Reduction techniques Retraditionalisation Right-wing Semantic network analysis (SNA) Definitions and acronyms Acronym Definition AfD Political party Alternative for Germany Deliverable D2.7 Page 6 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe ANO Czech political movement/party of Andrej Babiš CCN Co-occurrence network CEE Central and Eastern Europe COVID or Covid-19 Name used for the infectious disease Sars-CoV-2 ČSSD Czech Social Democratic Party EU European Union GDR German Democratic Republic, the socialist state of East Germany pre-1989 LGBT Lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans NGO Non-governmental organisation ODS Civic Democratic Party, Czech right-wing democratic conservative party PEGIDA German movement Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident PiS Law and Justice, Polish right-wing party led by Jarosław Kaczyński PO Civic Platform, Polish centre-right party led by Donald Tusk POPREBEL Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe: neo-traditionalism and neo-feudalism (project acronym) SPD Czech populist party Freedom and Direct Democracy of Tomio Okamura Deliverable D2.7 Page 7 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Executive Summary Overview POPREBEL is a large-scale, interdisciplinary, Horizon 2020-funded research project on the rise of populism in Central and Eastern Europe, with the goal of understanding the “anatomy” of this phenomenon and its causes, assessing its potential consequences, and proposing actionable policy solutions. Within this project, the objective of Work Package 2 (WP2) is to mobilise ethnographic methods and anthropological frameworks, paired with data visualisation and semantic network analysis, to render visible the processes of cultural meaning-making that underpin the rise of new populism in three countries under study: Poland, The Czech Republic, and Germany, with a specific emphasis on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on these processes. Through ethnographic interviews, we achieve insight into people’s affective interpretations of their social and communal reality, and analyse how these interpretations coalesce into cultural narratives and political subject formations. The combination of ethnography and network science allows us to construct a robust mixed-methods study, where we have been able to achieve nuanced country-specific and comparative insights through an iterative process that moves between ethnographic interpretation and semantic visualisation. Topic Areas Because of the comparative, multi-sited design of this project, the topic areas are organised by country. Four main topic areas emerged in each of the three countries under study. The first topic area “The Pandemic Context” was common to all three case studies, while the other three topic areas were individual to the specific case studies. In all three countries we found that the Covid-19 pandemic has functioned as simultaneously an amplifying and clarifying affective lens for already-existing sociopolitical ruptures. In other words, the government handling of the pandemic in all three cases appears to have both confirmed and exacerbated people’s feelings of alienation, disappointment, discontent, and disenchantment. This melange of feelings then finds expression in reactive, and often reactionary, forms of political or social engagement. In terms of the other key topic areas, they are as follows: Deliverable D2.7 Page 8 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Country Key Topic 1 Key Topic 2 Key Topic 3 Key Topic 4 Poland The Pandemic Context (see above) Polarisation of the Polish society Images and values of an ideal state “The cardboard state” (a.k.a. disillusionment / distrust toward state institutions) The Czech Republic The Pandemic Context (see above) Political disillusionment Subjectivity and affect as voting determinants Romanticization of history Germany The Pandemic Context (see above) Politics of affect Distrust of scientific expertise/antivax sentiments Retraditionalisation of gender roles Our key findings and conclusions are as follows, listed by country and then synthesised in a comparative, broader perspective. In the Czech Republic, there is pervasive political disillusionment that cross-cuts through various socioeconomic and ideological demographic segments of the population. Politics are deeply personalised, and consequently people’s electoral choices are often inconsistent, driven by immediate perceptions and feelings much more so than political alignment on the left-to-right spectrum. Important symbolic nodes in the affective political universe include communism (which triggers anti-nostalgia, rather than nostalgia), the EU (which is seen as oppressive by the conservative contingent of the society), and, most recently, the anti-Covid-vaccination movement, which has amplified anti-systemic illiberal factions of the society, as their conspiratological and nationalist thinking has dovetailed and merged with populist rhetoric. In Poland, there is a pervasive conviction that the Polish society is increasingly polarised due to the conflict dynamics between the current government and the main opposition party. The perceived division builds on two main sets of values, centred around a positive or a negative take on self-reliance: (1) individualization, where self-reliance is seen as aspirational and beneficial in an untrustworthy political context and (2) togetherness, where the current push for individual self-reliance is seen as a anti-social, and a sign of the decline of a Deliverable D2.7 Page 9 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe 1.1. The Ethnographic Sensibility Although political science as a discipline has developed along a more universalizing and quantitative route than anthropology, and has used ethnographic methods sparsely, power and politics are among the “bread and butter” topics within anthropology, and political anthropology is its own robust subfield of cultural / social anthropology. Historically anthropologists have worked in small-scale, non-Western societies where 'politics cannot be analytically isolated from kinship, religion, age-grade associations, or secret societies, because these are precisely the institutions through which power and authority are manifested; in many societies and in political subgroups within larger societies, ‘government’ either doesn’t not exist or is irrelevant at the local level.' (Lewellen, Political Anthropology: An Introduction) But ethnography, the constitutive method of anthropology, has since been used both by anthropologists and other social scientists to study many dimensions of modern, complex societies (Aronoff and Kubik 2013). Among the various genres of ethnography, one that centres on the problem of meaning formation, transmission and reception is associated with symbolic and interpretive anthropology. It is in this branch of the discipline that the “scientific” preoccupation with explanation and generalising gives way to the emphasis on interpretation, and attention is turned towards situational details. To illustrate this contrast one may recall Geertz’s (1983: 57) distinction between an “experience-near concept” which a person would use to define 'what he or his fellows see, feel, think, imagine,' and an 'experience-distant concept' employed by specialists, e.g., ethnographers to further their scientific (or other) aims, although '... the matter is one of degree, not polar opposition.' (1983: 57). Anthropology tends to rely more on experience-near concepts and work from the particular to the universal or to find the universal within the particular. As Geertz (1973: 23) says, 'Small facts speak to large issues.' Interpretive ethnography, whose version we try to practise here, is ‘based on participant observation of semiotic practices is premised on: (1) constructivism (the interpretation of actions “meaningful” to actors), (2) ontological realism and an epistemology that focuses on actual actions of real people, rather than variables, and (3) microscale observation of actual settings and the reconstruction of relevant mechanisms’ (Aronoff and Kubik 2013: xvii). What is left, if these principles are not realised? The pandemic made in-person fieldwork impossible, so we had to drop the third principle. But in our work on mapping the meanings people attach to their current situation, based on in-depth interviews, our team of trained anthropologists worked in the spirit of two other principles, constructivism and ontological realism. Deliverable D2.7 Page 16 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe “The objects” we are interested in (governments, parliaments, gender, nation, etc.) are socially constructed, meaning that they exist in narratives (texts) and people’s minds, and have certain attributes arranged in a way that may be construed differently by each discursive community. But the state is also an institutional reality, as it imposes constraints on human behaviour, and this twinned discursive-institutional mode of existence of all institutions, including the state, is the argument of discursive institutionalism in political science (Schmidt 2008). In other words it is a discursive reality endowed with enormous ontological heft. Thus, the state is not just “imagined” in a specific way; it is believed to exist (to be) in a specific way. The proponents of the ontological turn in anthropology go beyond discursive institutionalism and argue against the idea that there is only one “state” and different people have different views or interpretations of it (Haywood 2017). They work with the idea that “the state” I live in may be different from “the state” you live in, although conventionally we are both citizens of the same political entity called, for example “the American state.” The ontologies of the “real” we take for granted are different from what other people see as “natural,” as their reality is “put together” differently than ours and this has profound consequences for the way we reason and behave. As one of the most original anthropological thinkers, Arthur Maurice Hocart, put it: 'How can we make any progress in understanding of cultures, ancient or modern, if we persist in dividing what the people join and joining what they keep apart' ([1952] 1970: 23). Our job in the project is to reconstruct different ontologies of “the state” and other “objects” to be found in different discursive communities. We assume that various socio-political “objects” have complex meanings that can be reconstructed through the analysis of semantic networks in which they are embedded and which we extract from our data through coding and the four data reduction techniques that generate analyzable visualisations. Deliverable D2.7 Page 17 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe 1.2. Project background and context 1.2.1. Designing new digital ethnographies in Czechia, Germany, and Poland The national sub-fora in Czech, Polish, and German within Edgeryders platform that started their activities in early 2019 did not get as much interest from targeted audiences as expected, despite considerable efforts put into their promotion. When the SARS-Cov-2 (Covid-19) pandemic broke out, changing lives across the world for months to come, the project leaders decided to hire additional fieldwork researchers to conduct ethnographies and collect ‘deep’ interview data for the project. They were asked to: (1) design and conduct their own ethnographic studies tightly related to the main goal of the whole project, (2) engage people in person if possible, but (3) focus their energy on online interviews. In general, due to the pandemic situation, studies were to take place mostly online, making use of digital research methods. The idea was that the final product – presented in this deliverable – would be based on a combination of data and insights from two modes of ethnographic engagement: traditional, whose products are narrative accounts of ethnographers' experiences, and ethnographic data visualisation expected to result in visualisation of semantic networks constructed with the use of data generated by the coding process. We expected two situations: congruence and discrepancy. In the first case, each mode would produce mutually reinforcing results. In the second case, the results would be different. The latter situation would be particularly interesting – we assumed – as it would force us to look closely at the data and approach coding and interpretations iteratively, while also on the otherwise known fact that different methods may produce different pictures of reality. Our analysis has shown mostly congruence, with some notable discrepancies (for example, in the case of affect and gendered reactions to the Covid lockdowns in the German sample, as discussed in Section 3.3) In the final interpretations of the results, reported below, we took into account differences between the Czech, Polish, and German socio-historical contexts, reflected in many historical and sociological studies we consulted. The ethnographers set a goal to produce data of a nature similar, or at least analogous, to the one that would come out of the Edgeryders platform, had the fora worked as intended. Hence, research participants had to be social media users, who actively participate in public networked spaces, such as Facebook groups, Instagram comment sections, or public WhatsApp and Telegram chats. Also taken into account in the design of the new part of the study, was the different characteristics of populisms in Czech, Germany, and in Poland. Keeping these two Deliverable D2.7 Page 18 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe simple points in mind, the ethnographers established their field sites in public spaces of social media on their Polish-speaking, Czech-speaking, and German-speaking Internets. Digital ethnography is a well-established method of qualitative research (Bakardjieva 2005; Knox and Nafus 2018; Pink 2016), that has developed over the past 20 years as a response of social sciences to the growing popularity of digital communication and information technologies, namely the Internet, personal computers, and later on, mobile telephones. Qualitative research methodology has easily adjusted to new research conditions, following the idea that the same research methodology ought to be applied to the study of the online, as it was to the offline realm. When it comes to the study of the Internet, many studies take place in what Zizzi Papacharissi (2002, 2010, 2015), a communication scientist, and danah boyd (2007), a technology and social media scholar, call networked publics, or networked public spaces. Networked publics are publicly available spheres of social interaction, set by affordances of digital communication, where public debates and discussions take place. Digital fieldsites within the ethnographic part of the project were situated in those networked publics. If the essence of ethnography is commonly considered to be participant observation (Wacquant 2003), the meaning of ethnography in a study of networked publics needs to be elucidated, as it is not clear why a study of the discursive content generated on various social media platforms or via ethnographic interviews is not called simple content or discourse analysis. The answer depends, of course, on the definition of ethnography. As Schatz notes, ethnography can be understood not only as participant observation but also as a method of approaching the research topic with specific sensibility (2009: 5) whose main goal is the recovery of meaning actors generate, transmit and interpret. According to Boswell et al, '... focus groups are an ethnographic method because ethnography is now a diverse set of practices linked not by a shared method – participant observation – but by a shared focus on the recovery of meaning: the ethnographic sensibility' (Boswell et al. 2018). We agree with these points and although our principal method of data collection ultimately was interviewing, our interviewers were trained anthropologists equipped with ethnographic sensibility. The digital fieldwork that ultimately emerged as the dominant method of ethnographic engagement in this sub-project was conducted using two leading ethnographic research methods, adopted to the online environment. Entering the fieldsite would start with a participant observation of relevant posts and subsequent discussions that appeared on the selected platforms. Based on those observations, platform users were approached with an invitation to take part in the study, and if they agreed, semi-structured interviews were Deliverable D2.7 Page 19 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe conducted with contributing study participants. The potential participants, based on their engagement in the online discussions, were contacted via private messages on FB messenger. The one logistical issue of this approach was the particular configuration of Facebook messenger which automatically assigns messages from users who are not friends on Facebook into the category of ‘message requests’ which do not appear automatically on the messenger’s feed. This sometimes resulted in contacted users never receiving the messages, and required a more effort and proactive approach from the research. We did not explicitly ask study participants about their demographic data, giving them the freedom to choose what information they wished to share with us. However, most interviewees decided to include information on their education, profession or domicile, and related topics, in their answers to questions asked during the interview. Participants of this study represent a broad category of social media users, who engage in information exchange online. This purposive sample is not statistically representative of Polish, Czech or German societies, as there were no objectives set when it comes to the political leaning of the study participants and their demographic profiles. However, the sample is naturally randomised3, due the sampling method we used – digitally approaching social media users, active in online groups, without prior knowledge of their political profiling. Users who do not have trust in public research institutions didn’t agree to take part of the study, hence the study is biassed in that area. To provide a broad context to the study we estimated political leanings, as well as demographic profiles of research participants, based on the information they shared with us during interviews. The study doesn’t look into differences between responses of individual participants in relation to their estimated demographic or political profiles, hence the data presented below is strictly additional and contextual. Our methods of data analysis look at the empirical dataset as if it was a uniform body of text, a single voice multiple, hence details on who said what are not relevant. 1.2.1.1. The comparative basis of the three country-specific fieldworks In ethnography, and in humanities and social sciences more broadly, finding the right balance between particularism of single-case studies and comparative analysis of several cases has been widely debated for decades, and has mapped onto the broader debate about cultural universalism within anthropology. At times, 3Within certain parameters – as we discuss elsewhere in the report, we aimed to target ethnographic informants who were analogous to informants who would have been likely to engage with the Edgeryders platform, as per the original research design plan. Deliverable D2.7 Page 20 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe anthropology (especially the American anthropological community, grounded in Boasian historical particularism), has frowned on the uses of comparison, wary of its history as a heuristic going back to the early days of anthropological thought, when comparison, as the engine of cultural evolutionism, underpinned a model that ranked cultures in a Eurocentric hierarchy and erased the integrity of individual cultures. Recently, over time, anthropology has integrated the virtues of a comparative approach, when executed with nuance, as a generative one – for example, in the work of Heather Swanson, who notes that 'comparison is a practice that folds multiple worlds together' (2018: 104) – a practice in line with our aspiration in this project. Most anthropologists would agree that in the context of generating ethnographic knowledge, which is always inherently contextualized, localized, and ‘locally’ intersubjective, questions of scale and quantifiable comparisons are particularly difficult to navigate. This however does not render the identification of shared processes and social relations across different sites impossible. Ethnographic reality – for instance, the “anomiezation” (cf Durkheim4) and fragmentation of the European Union (and unity) project – can at times explicitly invite such comparisons, and we accept that invitation, while, in the ethnographic tradition, reserving primary importance for the local forms of meaning-making and agency-shaping practices, in specific contexts and situations. Comparing across ethnographic contexts thus entails a detailed thinking through analogies, relations and metaphors, placed side by side to one another (Candea 2019). In comparative politics, the whole family of comparative methods has recently become a subject of intense debate among methodologists and practitioners. While some scholars, including some of the best known adherents of the method of paired comparison (Tarrow 2010) or the method of controlled comparison (Slater and Ziblatt 2013) have continued advocating for these methods’ analytical usefulness rooted in Mill’s seminal work, others have called for a major overhaul of all comparative methods either within the positivist tradition (see, for example Seawright 2021) or some version of the interpretivist paradigm (Simmons and Smith 2021; Boswell, Corbet, and Rhodes 2019). As the researchers who adhere to this paradigm, we assume that even if the stringent conditions required for an effective application of the Millean controlled qualitative comparison are not met, a comparison can be productive for example to study systematically how people deal with “common dilemmas” (Boswell, Corbett, and Rhodes 2019, 1; see also Simmons and Smith 2021, 3). 4Emile Durkheim famously coined the concept of anomie in his book Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897) – it is commonly used as a shorthand for the breakdown of social bonds but has been more precisely argued to mean a waning of the moral regulatory power of society, in particular during periods of disruption and crises, and a mismatch individual action and social framework of norms. Deliverable D2.7 Page 21 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe From the onset of the study, the ethnographers drew upon a series of methodological approaches and practices, aimed at achieving a ‘comparativeness’ of the ethnographic material generated across the three country-specific fieldworks. These involved a number of meetings during which ethnographers exchanged relevant knowledge of their respective field sites (Poland, Czech Republic, Germany), and discussed similarities and patterns arising from the shared socialist experience and the country-specific political developments related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The outcome of these sessions shaped a shared fieldwork strategy, including a common conversation protocol listing themes and topics reflective of people’s dilemmas and intended for a discussion during the interviews with participants. However, the contextual specificity of each country did not impact only the research findings, meaning the configuration of the public opinion regarding the Covid-19 pandemic and populist politics more broadly. It also significantly shaped the methodological approaches and fieldwork practices which had to be adjusted to align with the country-specific notions of privacy and trust when sharing personal information in the online space. As a result, ethnographers had to make several strategic methodological decisions to match the needs and preferences of online users in each respective fieldsite. Each of them is summarised below. 1.2.1.2. The Czech fieldwork The digital fieldwork in Czech-speaking online spaces took place across 12 months between February 2021 and February 2022, and consisted of two primary phases. The first phase (Feb–April 2021) involved 10 semi-structured interviews held online, focused on the socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic crisis on labour and care. The aim was to get an overall picture of the nature and diversity of the experiences and perceptions of the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects. Building on these insights, the fieldwork set out to capture the participants’ changing political attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours, and to establish a broader connection between the covid-19 crisis and the new emerging forms of populist politics. The participants have been sampled through a snowballing method, which targeted primarily smaller-town-dwelling and non-university educated demographics. The decision to focus on this particular section of the society was made in order to balance out the fairly narrow sample of primarily university educated and liberal opinionated individuals who had been previously contributing to the Czech forum on the Edgeryders platform. The second fieldwork phase (April 2021 – February 2022) focused explicitly on online spaces on which, to put it broadly, Czech netizens express their views about the Covid crisis and the government handling thereof. While during the first phase, the research questions were approached via the lens of the socioeconomic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, the second phase shifted the focus to their political expressions in the online spaces. In doing so, the outcomes of the initial research have been operationalized as a contextual background for the multiple Deliverable D2.7 Page 22 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe interactions and discussions taking place on the web. Given the nature of the Czech online spaces and the particular demographics which each social media outlet tends to attract, the research focus was narrowed down to Facebook. This is because the targeted participant sample consisted of primarily middle-aged and older, smaller-town-dwelling and politically engaged users for whom Facebook represents the most accessible online platform. I.a. People expressing their political views on social media The participants were to be sought out on different Facebook groups and pages where general news about the Covid-19 pandemic situation (both domestically and internationally) would be shared and commented on. These included some of the main media outlet platforms and information channels across political spectrum (ČT24, Seznam zprávy, Echo24, A2LARM). Furthermore, potential participants were contacted based on their activity on Facebook pages of key politicians (Andrej Babiš(ANO), Tomio Okamura (SPD), The Czech Pirate Party). This strategy generated further understanding of how different political parties framed their discourses on relevant pandemic-related issues. I.b. People actively participating in various online ‘anti-covid’ groups The Czech ‘anti-Covid’ movement’s growing influence online and the populist style of their discourses made it a relevant field of investigation. The focus in this sub-category was on the Facebook groups and pages of the key emerging groups and actors (Volný Blok, Manifest.cz, Občanská Neposlušnost, TV Rapport, KTV, Zdravé Fórum), comprised of both civil society movements and emerging political parties. The research included participant observation of the discussions developing on these platforms and semi-structured interviews with participants who agreed to participate in an online call, primarily over Facebook messenger. II. People seeking Covid-related medical advice online This category involved several Facebook self-help groups, where individuals discussed and inquired about health-themed questions related to the Covid-19 viral infection (Pacienti s COVID 19 v ČESKU a na SLOVENSKU, SVÉPOMOC INSPIRACE, Detoxikuj život). This included individuals who tested positive, and who because of the lack of effective response from the official medical sources, had sought alternative remedies and tips from fellow group members. Another type of queries consisted of individuals suffering from long Covid symptoms, for whom the Facebook group provided a space to share their experiences and frustrations. Finally, on the more alt-med Deliverable D2.7 Page 23 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe style groups the primary topic of discussion centred on the resistance to and the negative effects of the Covid-19 vaccination. Online Interviews Jitka Kralova, the ethnographer who worked in the Czech Republic, sought out potential research participants based on their activity in the comment section under these posts. If their comment was expressing an opinion on the Covid-19 pandemic (its development and the Czech government’s response to it), she sent them a Facebook private message explaining the purpose of the research, how she found them (the specific Facebook discussion under which they commented) and asked whether they would be interested in arranging an online interview. The below screenshot is an example of the model message she would send: Figure 1: Invitation to join or project as a participant (in Czech) The message translated into English: Hello, I came across your comment under the FB post of Raport-TV involving a video of a protest against the change in the Public Health law. I am messaging you with a kind request for an interview. I am working as a researcher on a POPREBEL project, which investigates the phenomenon of populism and the socioeconomic impacts of the Covid-19 crisis in the Czech Republic. I contact a whole range of people, who are active on social media and express their opinions on related topics. This is why I am also contacting you. The interview would be very informal, fully anonymous and if you prefer, we can also conduct it in a written form, through the Facebook messenger chat. If you are interested and could dedicate some time in taking part in the research, I would be very grateful for your contribution. I will also gladly provide more information. Have a nice day, Jitka Deliverable D2.7 Page 24 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe In case of a participant's interest, we would arrange an interview via online call on the platform of participant’s choice (either Facebook messenger call or Zoom), or, if the participants felt uncomfortable speaking over the phone, in the form of chatnography (carrying out the interview via Facebook messenger chat). Prior to each interview I would send each research participant a more detailed description of the study in Czech and an electronic consent form to be signed before the beginning of the interview. The questions posed to the participants can be summarised under five main topic areas: a. the general views about the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic b. the perceptions of the Czech government’s approach to the pandemic c. the personal experience of the related restrictions and lockdowns and the impacts this had on participants’ personal and professional lives d. the perceptions of the current political representation and more general political views e. the assessment of the state institutions and media. These core thematic categories were discussed consistently across the sample, with individual questions varying slightly based on the participants’ responses and interest. In order to address the research question at the core of this POPREBEL project’s deliverable, namely the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on people’s changing political choices and voting behaviour (with particular focus on emerging populist sentiments), the following matters were discussed: ●The experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, the socioeconomic impacts of the restrictions on one’s life, overall perception of the pandemic and government’s restrictions, the attitude towards Covid-19 vaccination, and the reasons underpinning that attitude. ●The perceptions of the current government and its response to the Covid-19 crisis, how they perceived the imposed restrictions and the overall management of the pandemic, how effective were the compensations in their opinion, etc. ●The general state of politics, how do they feel about the choice of political parties, do they feel represented, who do they support/why, did the Covid-19 pandemic change their electoral choices in any way, why and how? ●The state institutions, can they rely on help from the state if needed, should the state be helping more, why/why not, what are some of the biggest gaps in the functioning of the state, what should be improved, what are some of the biggest challenges for the future? Deliverable D2.7 Page 25 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Politics M F > 300 000 > 100 000 < 100 000 < 20 000 (R) libertarian 7 1 2 1 5 (R) conservative 1 4 3 2 (C) liberal 6 5 9 1 1 (C) conservative 1 2 1 1 1 (L) liberal 1 6 6 1 (L) social-dem 5 16 19 1 1 (L) conservative 1 2 3 The table below shows how political categorizations unfold throughout age groups. Table 4. Political categories in Polish fieldwork in relation to age categories. Politics <20 >20 >30 >40 >50 >60 >70 (R) libertarian 2 3 2 1 (R) conservative 5 (C) liberal 5 2 3 1 (C) conservative 1 1 1 (L) liberal 4 2 1 (L) social-dem 12 7 1 1 (L) conservative 2 1 Deliverable D2.7 Page 32 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe (0) non-cat 1 Based on the data that we presented in tables above, we can draw several conclusions about the character of the Polish data set: ●Nearly two out of three study participants lived in cities whose population is larger than 300 000. ●One out of three study participants was below the age of 30, while one in three participants below the age of 40. ●Out of the 11 respondents that lived in cities below 20 000 inhabitants, or in villages, more than a half have conservative views, predominantly right-wing libertarian views. ●Centrist or right-wing views were more popular among study participants who were over 30 years old, while leftist views were generally more popular among those below 20 years old. ●Preliminary analysis suggests that most big city inhabitants had liberal, centrist or leftist views. ●Interestingly, by coincidence the age representation in this study is consistent with Internet usage statistics in Poland (CBOS, 2019). While this breakdown won’t be used in the data analyses presented further in the report, it will guide our further work and inform the preparation of some materials used in broader dissemination of the results. 1.2.1.4. The German fieldwork Germany was arguably the spearhead/ground zero (Institute for Strategic Dialogue 2021) for anti-lockdown movements, conspiracy theories (Loucaides, Perrone and Holnburger 2021), vaccine hesitancy, and anti-elites’ discourses during the pandemic in Europe. Due to limitations posed by the realities of Covid-19 and lockdowns, the ethnography7focused on finding informants discussing the issues above online on Facebook groups. In a nutshell, where anthroposophist attitudes and populist narratives intersected in discussions. It is important to note that populist sentiments and movements in Eastern Germany during the pandemic did not suddenly emerge but are the result of several decades of socio-economic and socio-political grievances. The electoral success of the far-right party AFD (Alternative for Germany) and the severity of PEGIDA movement (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident) laid a lot of the populist groundwork in the Eastern states (Göpffarth 2018). 7Unlike the Polish and Czech case studies, the German study did not have the initial, pre-Covid Edgeryders platform-based phase Deliverable D2.7 Page 33 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe The first phase of online research consisted of detecting suitable groups on Facebook. Suitable in this context means digital social ecosystems in which German speaking users voiced their opinions on the pandemic, with a strong emphasis on opinions that displayed discontent and mistrust vis a vis political elites. This fieldwork built on a fluid set of questions that were used in semi-structured interviews with informants that agreed to participate in the study. Given Germany’s special relationship to data privacy and data protection (Germany has the most stringent data protection laws in Europe), getting potential informants to agree to be interviewed proved to be challenging. This hesitancy has its roots in Nazism, where Hitler used extensive census tools in his fascist state and in the practices of the STASI in the GDR, where up to 1% of the population were informants for the state (Waxman 2018). The informants who agreed to be interviewed mostly preferred conducting them via Facebook messenger, email exchange, or video calls where the camera was shut off. In September 2021, Facebook decided to shut down numerous Facebook sites and groups due to the spread of misinformation. Some of the groups shut down had proven to produce interviewees willing to talk, which further hampered the progress of research (Culliford 2021). In order to attract more informants, the researchers organised and hosted an online event with ca. 20 participants. This digital event enabled us to create break out rooms on zoom, so that we could conduct focus group style discussions revolving around the same topics as in the 1 on 1 interviews. 1.2.2. Ethnographic coding: Generating the secondary data and re-building the codebook The first step in the analysis of the POPREBEL ethnographic material was qualitative coding. Codes were developed via an interactive process, as coders were engaged in constant mutual rigorous scrutiny of their proposals and were subjected to ongoing revisions. This process resulted in the generation of what we called the final ‘ontology’ for the ethnographic part of the project. However, mirroring the overall dynamics of the research as a whole, the evolution of the coding practices and the construction of ontology were closely tied to the changes in the methods of data collection and digital their (re-)production. Phase 1: Inductive exploration (1/2019–1/2020). The pilot phase. During the first year, the coders went through an initial training and acquainted themselves with the Open Ethnographer platform created by Edgeryders and learned the principles of the codes/ontology creation. During the initial phase, coders were working individually on their respective datasets and were given free hand to code the emerging online conversation in a purely inductive manner in their own languages. At the end of the first Deliverable D2.7 Page 34 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe phase the first version of the ontology was created. In addition to producing a set of codes in the languages of interviews, it also included a standardised labelling convention for compatibility. The first version of the hierarchy of codes was also developed. In general, this phase was very much a pilot study of the new methodology as the ground rules for coding practice were continuously amended and nuanced on the ER platform. Phase 2: Global codebook organisation (4/2020–4/2021) Following a relatively brief COVID-caused intermission, the work on the ontology resumed with completion of the first dataset coding (online conversations). The data analysis was in parallel accompanied by firstly a unification code usage and codebooks between the joint teams coders processing the same linguistic segments (Czech and Polish). The second step was the creation of a platform for a global codebook revision, which marked the beginning of the focused process of ontology rewriting. After many discussions, a new set of foundational principles emerged from this phase. This was necessary – we decided –as the initial, inductive phase of coding resulted in the creation of a set of codes that was simply too large. After a short period of testing, we developed several simple principles whose adoption was going to lead to the controlled loss of information but generate a more readable map of the meaning network that emerged from the interviews. The new principles included: ●Non-differentiation of codes in terms of meta-analysis (personal, behavioural etc.) ●Abandonment polarity recording (“non-”prefix, “negation” via co-occurrences) ●Adoption of English as the sole language of coding ●The reduction of emic/etic perspectives differentiation to “in-vivo” and general codes and other. The expanding methodological discussions were recorded in Ethnographic Coding Wiki and the general Open Ethnographer Manual thread (https://edgeryders.eu/t/open-ethnographer-manual/6811). The project ontology began to go through a process of both vertical and horizontal reduction, as the initial dataset coding product was evaluated as too granular and containing too many overlaps among the different strains of coding. The result was an ontologically-proper pillar structure of the codebook. Phase 3: Reduction through categorization (4/2021–2/2022) After the major revisions an idea for application of meta-categories emerged to tackle several issues –generative aggregation of codes around general concepts, continuously increasing number of codes representative of the Deliverable D2.7 Page 35 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe emerging ontological and functional nuances and the felt need to create a relevant analytical structure for populism (discussion here). The codes were to be organised into the following topology of 9 categories:Type of action or inaction, Actor, Issue, Ideology, Emotions, Value(s), Places/locations/scale, Institutions and Time (History/past, Diagnosis of the present, Prognosis). The system was dubbed “Project's grammar” and was designed with the intention to contain incoming codes as well as closely represent the narratives found in the data. Methodologically this moment represents the abductive-shift in terms of the project ontology vision, as this categorisation was supported by a broad spectrum of theoretical literature. Ontology reorganisation along these principles was implemented in the Open Ethnographer environment, the Categories became top level codes in the hierarchy, dubbed Z-level codes. Z codes became merely analytical containers not to be used for final visualisations. Within these containers, the ontological hierarchy was reduced to only two levels: more general Y and more specific X. For further review process, the categorization proved as an invaluable asset, though a decision was made in the end not to produce its network visualisation or further analytical implementation. It is worth noting that all the three levels of project ontology were subjected to changes to correspond with the development of the global codebook, including the Z level. The code reduction protocol consisted of a repeated set of procedures proving the salience of each individual code: confirming proper ontological relations [X and Y] and [Z, X and Y], searching for label duplicates (similarly named codes denoting same or similar phenomena), searching for semantic duplicates (codes labelled differently but denoting same or similar phenomena). The following operations were responding to any issues identified through these procedures –repositioning the codes within the ontology, merging similar codes, reorganising and redistributing annotations within codes by forking them and finally destroying codes found to be of little significance or improper conceptualization. Phase 4: Second dataset implementation (2/2022–12/2022) While performing continuous reduction along these lines, it was clear based on previous experiences, that the second phase of coding over the second set of ethnographic data poses a potential challenge of an influx of new codes. In order to avoid such a situation, a decision was taken to push the whole vertical dimension of the project ontology to a slightly higher level of abstraction and generality. To accomplish this, the existing X-level codes were reorganised into new X-level codes, belonging to what might be called a meso-level occupying an imagined space between the previous Y-level and X-level codes. With this operation, after continuous review accompanying the coding of the second dataset of ethnographic interviews, we arrived at the final version of the project ontology. Deliverable D2.7 Page 36 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe 1.2.3. Data The POPREBEL corpus data analysed in this document consists of transcripts from semi-structured interviews in Czech, German and Polish. Their breakdown by country is as follows. All informants were pseudonymized before the transcripts of the interviews were recorded on the cloud software we used for coding. Table 5: the number of project participants and the number of words recorded Women Men Total Word count Czech 25 29 54 253,046 German 32 10 42 72,869 Polish 35 24 59 239,661 Total 92 63 155 565,576 A multi-lingual team headed by UCL then coded the corpus. The team held regular meetings to ensure inter-coder methodological consistency. It maintained a cross-language ontology of codes, to ensure that the same codes could be used across the different languages. Coding was iterative and abductive. The team coded using Open Ethnographer, a tool embedded in the edgeryders.eu forum platform. Open Ethnographer supports character-based coding. This means that ethnographers highlight snippets of text, and associate to each snippet one or more ethnographic codes. Table 6: the number of annotations and codes Annotations Codes Czech 3,694 588 German 2,299 882 Deliverable D2.7 Page 37 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Polish 6,196 808 Total 12,189 1,516 The total number of codes is smaller than the sum of the number of codes used in each of the three languages, precisely because some codes are used to annotate transcripts across POPREBEL languages. In particular: that is annotated with both those codes. The CCN is undirected ( ). There can be more than one edge 𝐴 ⇒𝐵 ≡ 𝐵 ⇒ 𝐴 between each pair of nodes. Figure 2: Logic of co-occurrences between two codes in the same contribution ●213 codes annotate interviews in all three languages. ●76 codes annotate interviews in Czech and German. ●123 codes annotate interviews in Czech and Polish. ●137 codes annotate interviews in German and Polish. POPREBEL data are archived on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7477600 1.2.4. Building the codes co-occurrence network Following Cottica et al (2020), we call the minimal unit of text data that can be meaningfully coded a contribution. Coding consists of associating snippets of the contribution's text to keywords, called codes. The association of a snippet and a code is called an annotation. Deliverable D2.7 Page 38 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe We can think of such an annotated corpus as a two-mode network. Nodes are of two types, contributions and codes. By associating a code to a contribution, the ethnographer creates an edge between the respective nodes. From the two-mode network described above, we induce, by projection, the one-mode codes co-occurrence network (CCN). In it, each node represents an ethnographic code. An edge is induced between any two codes for every contribution. We interpret co-occurrence as association. If two codes co-occur, it means that one informant has made references to the concepts or entities described by the codes in the same contribution, seen as a unit. Hence, we assume, both concepts belong to this person's culture-generated mental map. The corpus-wide pattern of co-occurrences is taken to encode the collective mental map of informants. 1.2.5. Mixed methods at work Once constructed, CCNs can be studied to reveal patterns of associations prevalent among informants. Networks lend themselves to intuitive visualisations that can support inference in many fields, including the social sciences (Munzner 2014). Unfortunately, CCNs tend to be large and dense, and therefore resistant to visual analysis. To overcome this limitation, we have developed a systematic, theoretically-grounded approach to the reduction of this type of network. (Cottica et al 2022). The idea is to rank-and-prune the network’s edges: first, choose a metric to rank edges. Next, discard the lowest-ranking ones. Repeat the process until the network becomes small and sparse enough for visual analysis. In this perspective, reducing a CCN boils down to choosing a theoretically grounded criterion according to which to rank its edges. We argue that four criteria have three attractive properties. The first: they are effective in reducing the size and density of the CCN, so that the reduced CCN is amenable to visual analysis. The second: they can be mapped to major approaches in anthropology and sociology. The third: they are complementary, allowing us to examine the data from different theoretical perspectives. They are summarised in Table 7 below. Table 7: Four techniques of reduction of codes co-occurrence networks (CCNs) Technique Edges are important when… Reduction techniques correspond to some central theoretical ideas in anthropology core values … they connect two codes with high Central or dominant symbols in a Deliverable D2.7 Page 39 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe core values (Giatsidis et al., 2011) culture (Ortner, 1973; Turner, 1973) Simmelian backbone … they are highly redundant (Nick et al., 2013) Culture as a field of competing forces (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2019; Gramsci, 1975; Laitin, 1986) association depth (d) … they encode a co-occurrence that occurs many times in the corpus Culture as a structured network of uneven density (structuralism and post-structuralism, for example Lévi-Strauss, 2010) association breadth (b) … they encode a co-occurrence that occurs in the contributions of many informants The workflow we used is the following: ●First, we identified the codes with the very highest core values, and examined their list as a proxy for the “core symbols” used in our corpus. ●Second, we extracted the CCN’s Simmelian backbone, experimenting with different redundancy thresholds until the reduced network resolved in clearly identifiable communities of codes; we then examined the different semantic communities of codes and how they connect to one another. ●Finally, we reduced the CCN to its edges whose association depth was highest, and examined the reduced network as a collection of the most frequently repeated, hence in a sense structural, association between codes. We then repeated the latter operation with highest association breadth edges; this was mostly a way to control for the presence of deep associations between codes that were, nevertheless, the byproduct of only one or two informants repeating those associations over and over again. We also applied the reduction by association depth and/or association breadth to the ego networks of individual codes of interest, based on the research questions pursued by POPREBEL as a whole and by researchers analysing subsets of the data. ●It is important to note that not all reduction techniques are optimal for every research question and every research design. Part of the iterative process of us working with the ethnographic data and the visualisations was establishing which reductions would be most relevant to this particular study, and the Deliverable D2.7 Page 40 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe outcomes of that process are reflected in the visualisations that are present in this report. In other words, while the visualisations included in the report in the subsequent sections were produced with the association depth and association breadth reduction techniques, that does not mean that we did not utilise the other techniques in our data analysis process, or that those techniques were irrelevant – starting with the Core Values and Simmelian Backbone reduction techniques, as exemplified here, helped us recognize that reductions geared at structural analysis of the corpus (i.e. the depth and the breadth reductions) should be our primary focus. Thus, in this particular case, the absence of those visualisations in the final report is also a testament to their usefulness. 1.2.6. Accounting for gender Gender has a profound impact on how individuals participate in their culture. Our data account for gender as follows. First, field ethnographers kept track of the (self-reported) gender of informants. These data were not stored in the POPREBEL forum platform, but in separate tables associating a letter denoting gender (“M” or “F”, since no informant reported other genders) to the pseudonym assigned to the informant. When building the CCN, data on informant gender were used to build a variable we called “female prevalence” or ,computed as follows: 𝑓𝑝 𝑓𝑝(𝑐𝑜𝑑𝑒1, 𝑐𝑜𝑑𝑒2) =𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑓𝑒𝑚𝑎𝑙𝑒 𝑖𝑛𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑠 𝑤ℎ𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑏𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑎𝑡 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑡 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑐𝑜−𝑜𝑐𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑐𝑜𝑑𝑒1 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑐𝑜𝑑𝑒2 𝑡𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑖𝑛𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑠 𝑤ℎ𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑏𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑎𝑡 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑡 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑐𝑜−𝑜𝑐𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑐𝑜𝑑𝑒1 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑐𝑜𝑑𝑒2 varies between 0 and 1. When , the association between and is being 𝑓𝑝 𝑓𝑝(𝑐𝑜𝑑𝑒1, 𝑐𝑜𝑑𝑒2) = 0 𝑐𝑜𝑑𝑒1 𝑐𝑜𝑑𝑒2 supported only by males; vice versa, indicates an association supported only by female 𝑓𝑝(𝑐𝑜𝑑𝑒1, 𝑐𝑜𝑑𝑒2) = 1 informants. For example, if two codes Aand Bco-occur in the interviews of four female and one male informants, . In the CCN, is a property of the edges, not of the codes; in the visualisations of 𝑓𝑝(𝐴,𝐵= 4/5 = 0.2 𝑓𝑝 section 3 we represent it using edge colour. We used an algorithm that colours edges bright green when ; 𝑓𝑝= 0 grey when ; and bright orange when . Intermediate values of are shaded accordingly 𝑓𝑝= 0.5 𝑓𝑝= 1 𝑓𝑝 between these three main colours, using a linear algorithm so that, for example, an edge with is 𝑓𝑝= 0.25 halfway between green and grey. 1.3. The Process One of the frequent questions that arise in more inductive and exploratory research projects like this one concerns the choice of topics researchers focus on and investigate in depth in their final reports. In this project, the choice of topics that eventually focused our attention was driven by considerations in four areas: (1) literature Deliverable D2.7 Page 41 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe ●Nowa Lewica (N; eng. the New Left Party) – a centre-left party, representing state-interventionist, social-democratic, socio-liberal, anticlerical, feminist, and pro-environmentalist ideals. It’s a new political formation created in 2021 by the union of the Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej (SLD, eng. Democratic Left Alliance) and Wiosna (eng. Spring). In the parliamentary coalition with the Razem party, holding 38 seats in the 2019 Sejm. ●Razem (eng. Together) – a left-wing party, in coalition with the New Left Party, representing feminist, pro-European, and social-democratic ideas. Established in 2015 as an answer to the 2015 parliamentary elections, when none of the left-wing parties entered the parliament. In the 2019 Sejm it holds 6 seats. ●Polska Partia Socjalistyczna (PPS; eng. Polish Socialist Party) – a socialist party with 3 parliamentarians in Sejm and 2 senators in Senate in the 2019 elections. Figure 3 shows the five major coalitions in the Polish Sejm, the lower chamber of the parliament, in 2019. For the purpose of clarity, we have listed them below by the number of seats won: 1. Law and Justice Party Coalition (235): PiS, SD, Porozumienie, 2. Civic Coalition (134): parties Civic Platform, Nowoczesna, Green Party, 3. Left Coalition (49): parties New Left, PPS, and Razem, 4. PSL/Polish Coalition (30): parties PSL and Kukiz’15), 5. Confederation Freedom and Independence (11): parties Konfederacja, KORWiN, non-party nationalist politicians. Deliverable D2.7 Page 48 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Figure 3: Five major coalitions in Sejm, the lower chamber of the Polish parliament, in a result of 2019 parliamentary elections. Source: Newsweek Polska These general characteristics of the political spectrum provide context for the analysis presented in paragraphs below. We believe that it is crucial to recognize the extent to which a strict application of simplifying definitions of what constitutes the left, the centre, and the right is fruitless, when it comes to analysing one country’s political culture in all its past and present complexity. There are three major themes that stand out in the Polish fieldwork data: (1) the polarisation of Polish society, as seen and experienced by research participants; (2) images of an ideal state, embedded in specific values; (3) the notion of a cardboard state, which captures the disillusionment with the political class and the lack of trust towards state institutions. The following section is structured around those themes, while the analysis of the material itself is framed by two theoretical assumptions. 2.1.3. Polarisation, antagonism, division? Narratives on the condition of Polish society Deliverable D2.7 Page 49 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe This section provides an overview of several major issues related to the overall condition of Polish society, a major topic in conversations Magda Goralska had with research participants during the study. Questions such as 'how do you like living in Poland?' or 'what would you like to change in Poland?' provoked the interviewees to share their often critical thoughts on the state of their own, smaller community, broader society, or the nation. The formation of nations and the emergence of the national form of collective identity belong to the core themes studied by the modern social sciences from their beginning., A well-established, post-modern anthropological perspective on the matter is best summarised by the concept of imagined communities, a term coined by Benedict Anderson in his 1983 book. Together with a number of other influential scholars (Gellner, Kohn, Billig), Anderson sees nation as a community of people, who perceive themselves as being a part of a certain group, pointing out that the nation is a cultural and social construct, with a traceable and relatively short history. In his recent Ludowa Historia Polski (2020), Leszczynski traces in detail how the idea of the Polish nation has evolved from the “elites as the nation”to the modern version of the concept, in which the peasant nation (pl. naród chłopski) and the noble nation (pl. naród szlachecki) merge. He points towards the centuries of state and class divisions to explain the origins of current political polarisation and social cleavages, whose study has a long tradition in Polish sociology.10 Keeping this in mind, Goralska looked into ways research participants perceive Polish society and their communities. The findings are summarised in three subsections: (1) social divisions, (2) antagonisms and polarisation, and (3) alienation. 2.1.3.1. Narratives of differences and divisions What are the major divisions within Polish society in the eyes of the study’s participants? The question was never asked directly, but several answers emerged organically during the conversations about the state of Polish society, the country, and, most importantly, Polish politics. The social cleavage that’s at the centre of those conversations each time is the clash between two major parties, the Civic Platform (pol. Platforma Obywatelska, PO) and the Law and Justice Party (pol. Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS), or rather social groups they represent, or are perceived to be representing. Ola, who lives in Katowice in the south of Poland and perceives herself as having leftists political views, says: I think that the Civic Coalition didn’t notice any social issues, the growing inequalities, that a part of society is excluded…Neither the Left did give an answer to the problem, so some people who needed 10 For the results of an authoritative study, see, for example Słomczyński et al 2014. Jasiewicz (2022) examines, inter alia, the links between social structure and political behaviour of Poles. Deliverable D2.7 Page 50 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe money to live just voted for PiS. Some people think there is a culture war in Poland, and that the Christian tradition is dying, and that it's absurd that we are introducing some equality standards. This is that group, which really wants for us not to change, so conservative, who do what it takes to make sure that such changes do not happen. (PL55Ola30a) To her, the people she talks about are those who voted for the Law and Justice Party and brought it to power, whereas the current opposition parties, PO and the New Left, were unable to appeal to those parts of the society. What drives PiS voters are money, social welfare concerns and/or conservatism. They are 'mostly people from smaller cities, from the country, less educated, older, right. So it’s a little bit like those are people who have the smallest, the narrowest cognitive horizon, are the easiest to manipulate' (PL15Dawid30b). When asked about the condition of Polish society, Mateusz, who is over 45 years old, says that 'this dream to be someone of higher status, a nobleman, it’s some sort of obsession of those who got rich, and now they think they are from the better league. [...] We are [however] living in the country of the peasants, because our intelligentsia was wiped out [during World War II]' (PL36Mateusz40b). The divisions in Polish society in the words of research participants refer to values, education and financial situation. The class, when referred to, is deemed inadequate as a concept, because the differences in the society are more complex and do not easily align with class distinctions. Ethnographic data suggest that Polish society is not only divided, but also fragmented. Social fragmentation is often referred to in people’s remarks on class-based and geography-based bubbles, such as 'my Warsaw bubble' (PL39Wiktoria30a). Another interviewee, Ola from Katowice, speaks more directly on the matter, when asked why in her opinion people vote for the Law and Justice Party. She admits while it is the question she asks herself every time, when thinking about divisions in Poland, she is 'in a bubble, I am completely aware of it, so my friends do not represent such [PiS] views' (PL55Ola30a). Ania, who lives in a big city as well and works as a public official, notes that we are 'too much of a mix, in between the mentality of the West and the East', and that the 'divisions will always be there, and if the divides are going to be there so will wars, and there never be an agreement' (PL26Ania30b).11 Has the pandemic changed anything? According to some research participants, despite the initial unity in the wake of the crisis, the pandemic has strengthened social divisions. The biggest issue was the one of vaccinations. Mateusz notes that 'suddenly some of my friends are anti-vaxxers' (PL36Mateusz40b), and Maciej says that even families got divided over it (PL49Maciej60a). 11 Other studies confirm the existence of a very strong sense that Polish society is deeply divided. See Sadura and Sierakowski (2021:19). Deliverable D2.7 Page 51 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Visualisations of the coded data corpus, where codes represent topics raised by the research participants, not only sheds light at the structure of discourse (culture) our respondents ‘carry in their heads’, but can also provide a different perspective on the complexities of social divisions. The visualisation below shows the networks of concepts, affects and institutions the interviewees associated with the Catholic Church and the topic of abortion. The abortion code is linked with codes that capture social perception of the issue, in light of recent changes in law that regulates pregnancy termination in Poland, which sparked social unrest and a wave of protests in 2020 and 2021. On the 23rd of October 2020, the Constitutional Court ruled that the current law on abortion, known as the abortion compromise, is against the Constitution of the Republic of Poland, as it doesn’t protect life. The compromise was a regulation governing the matter of pregnancy termination, that was a result of the Church-supported conservative lobbying during the transition period of early 1990s, when Poland was shifting towards becoming a neoliberal state. During the communist times access to abortion was supported by the state and available by request till the 12th week of pregnancy. In 1993 the new abortion regulations allowed abortion only in three cases: in the case of criminal activity, such as rape or incent (1), in the case of a threat to the mother’s life (2), and in the case of the severe and irreversible damaged to the fetus (3), that makes up 98% of all abortion performed in Poland each year (Rada Ministrów 2022). The ruling issued on October 23rd 2020 stated that performing abortion in case 3 is against the Polish Constitution. The decision sparked nation-wide protests, the largest since the game-changing Solidarity movement’s strikes that brought the end to the rule of the Communist Party, and started the complex process of quintuple regime transformation (Kubik 2013). Thousands went to the streets despite restrictions, accusing the government for pushing for the controversial change in the law during the pandemic, in the hope that the society will not oppose. Protests known as Strajk Kobiet didn’t stop the new law that took effect in January 2021 (Kuraś2021). Based on the results of semantic network analysis, Figure 4shows that the discursive clusters around the two important codes, ‘abortion’ and ‘the Catholic Church’, are strongly interconnected through codes that signify various aspects of social divisions and speak to societal differences. The set of codes in-between the two codes of interest includes several categories denoting various phenomena such as ‘tolerance’ or ‘legality’ but also relevant social agents, such as ‘young people '. The colour of edges maps to gender balance: recall from section 1.2.6 that bright green edges represent associations supported predominantly by male informants; grey edges represent associations supported equally by female or male informants; and bright orange edges represent associations supported predominantly by female informants.Grey edges represent co-occurrences supported more or less equally by female and male informants, with more muted tones of green/orange representing prevalence (but not Deliverable D2.7 Page 52 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe exclusivity) of, respectively, male/female informants. We can see that the study participants have spoken about politicisation,religiosity, LGBT community within the context of political corruption (code DDpolcor), political manipulation efforts (code CULman) and propaganda narratives (code CULdemon). The existence of such a cluster seems to signal a hostile environment, where social divisions are exacerbated, making a civilised public debate (code seeking civilised debate) on issues such as abortion or Church reform impossible. The graph also suggests that social divisions attributable to different worldviews or values might have their roots in the deepening generational gap. When we look at the semantic network around the Catholic Church node, we note that it contains the issues the Church currently faces: its negatively assessed deep involvement in politics and the slow exodus from the Church. Our results are confirmed by recent survey data that shows a growing number of apostasies (KAI, 2021), declining participation in religious rituals among highly educated and city dwellers, and a drastic fall in a number of young people participating in the Church life, the process that indicates the deepening disagreement with the conservative worldview of older generations (CBOS, 2022b, 2022c, 2022d). Equally importantly, Figure 4 provides a powerful insight into the gender gap in the analysed set of interviewee responses. The topic of abortion was connected with a host of other topics predominantly by women (orange edges), and was raised, for example, in the context of social activism, social inequality, difficulties in access to healthcare, and more general criticism of the state. The topic is associated with the younger generation, for which taking part in the protests has often been the first act of political engagement, as we know from other studies. The code ‘young people’ connects to the code ‘Catholic Church’ with a green line that shows that the relationship between the Church and the younger generation was more frequently discussed by men. In the context of abortion, male respondents tended to speak about polarisation and social divisions more often than women. When talking about the Catholic Church, they would also mention the Church’s importance in supporting traditional values and being part of Polish heritage. This suggests that male study participants were overall more conservative than female respondents, a tendency well documented by survey-based studies (Jasiewicz 2022, CBOS 2021a, CBOS 2021b). Both genders (grey edges) across the political spectrum agreed, however, that the Church is in need of reforms, suffering from the detachment from reality, demagoguery, lack of openness (code tolerance), and political overinvolvement, as represented by the code politicisation, that is linked to both the abortion code and the Catholic Church code. Another interesting take away from the visualisation is the character of the semantic network around the node SAsupdef (support deficit), particularly the links to abortion and the Church. This relationship can be interpreted as an expression of disappointment with both the state and the Church, which introduce rules and limitations that are seen as purely political or ideological, and not based on objective points of Deliverable D2.7 Page 53 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe reference, such as science or evidence-based medicine. While displaying such authoritarian proclivities, both institutions do not offer enough support to those affected by the new reality, especially when it comes to healthcare issues, such as access to abortion. While the pandemic was without question a truly total experience in its own right, the change in the pregnancy termination law was a highly polarising event of strongly political nature. Figure 4: the codes Catholic Church and abortion and their neighbours. Each edge is underpinned by the contributions of at least 3 informants. In the following visualisation (Figure 5) we present a highly reduced semantic network around the node representing the ruling party, PiS.12 12 These visualisations show only those nodes that cooccurred with node ‘PiS’ at least 25 times. Deliverable D2.7 Page 54 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Figure 5: Highly reduced CCN ( ). The codes for abortion and the Catholic Church are connected 𝑑≥ 25 via that for the Law and Justice party. The Catholic Church is the main champion of the strict anti-abortion regime in Poland. But which frame do people employ when they think about the relationship between abortion and the most powerful religious institution in the country? In other words, what is the semantic context within which this relationship is embedded? Our method of semantic network analysis allows us to shed some light on such questions. In strongly reduced CCNs the relationship between the Catholic Church and abortion, as construed by almost half our study’s participants, is not direct but mediated by reference to the most powerful political actor on the Polish political scene: the ruling Law and Justice Party13. This means that when these people talk about the Catholic Church and abortion, they simultaneously reference the ruling party. This, in turn, indicates a high level of politicisation of the issue of abortion that is framed in people’s minds not just in moral but also in political terms. To put this finding in the 13 The codes for abortion and the Catholic Church are also directly associated to one another, but their association is shallower than those with the code for the Law and Justice party (d = 12). Deliverable D2.7 Page 55 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe fullest perspective afforded by our study, we can set the level of co-occurrence to its highest level for this dataset (d = 38). It turns out that when the parameter is at its maximum only two concepts, both centrally relevant for the present analysis, remain: Law and Justice Party and… cultural or ideological manipulation. The graph reveals two further intriguing semantic phenomena. When the parameter is set to 25 co-occurrences, the Law and Justice Party is associated not only with cultural-ideological manipulation, but also with political corruption and cultural polarisation, while its main competitor on the political scene, the Civic Platform Coalition, is not associated with any of these vices with the same frequency. To be precise, all the three vices our interviewees attribute to Law and Justice Party and still present when the level of co-occurrences is set at 25, in the case of Civic Platform Coalition, disappear at a lower level of 18. Importantly, people associate the Coalition with the question of abortion far less frequently. The link between these two concepts disappears at the level of co-occurrence set at 7. This confirms the idea found in other studies that in 2021-2 it is the Law and Justice Party that is responsible for the incessant politicisation of the issue of abortion. 2.1.3.2. Social antagonisms and polarisation Some contemporary theorists and researchers of media communication point out that new information and communication technologies lead to the polarisation of the public debate. This in turn, they argue, could reinforce social divisions and antagonise certain groups against each other. While the thesis is debatable (Postill, 2018), the topic of polarisation and antagonisms within Polish society has often come up during conversations with our research participants. Reflecting on the matter in the more global context, Olek, who works in the IT sector and is in his late 30s, says that, [...] The majority of conversation on the Internet, at least in the political context, ends with negative emotion between the sides. And it seems like it is a slow process of escalation of negative emotions as a result of the lack of communication, or being open to communication, which comes from the limitations of social media, which are at large textual, there is no tone of voice involved, and so on. And also people use different definitions of different concepts. It’s even worse than the lack of communication, it’s an inverse of communication, de-communication. It makes people see the other side in a more and more negative light. And this strong polarisation is escalating all the time. And we are right now in a moment, where it is an advanced problem, and it’s hard to do anything about it. (PL45Olek20b) Deliverable D2.7 Page 56 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe As a result some Internet users refrain from engaging in discussions online. Beata, who is in her late thirties and has leftist views, shares that 'I am not commenting. I did it a few times and it is incredibly emotionally straining. I am not commenting in public [anymore]. I write right away that I can talk [on the topic] in a private chat' (PL10Beata30b). However, for the majority of the interviewees the actions of political parties are the main cause of the growing antagonism between various groups within Polish society. According to some research participants, the two most voted-for parties, the Civic Platform and the Law and Justice, are the ones to blame in particular, as both use very polarising narratives about their political opponents and their voters. Zosia, who grew up in the suburbs of Warsaw and is in her late twenties, thinks that 'the biggest problem with the politics is this setup, that there are two parties, and they don’t want to allow the third [power] in. They are fighting against it in all ways possible. Paradoxically, in my opinion, especially when it comes to local authorities' (PL07Zosia20b). Mateusz, an over 45 years old businessman, sees the beginning of the growing political divisionism and 'antagonisation by the two camps' in the early 2000 (PL36Mateusz40b). Even the respondents who vote for the two biggest parties note negative consequences of such polarising narrative strategies. Jacek, a PiS voter who is in his early thirties and has two small daughters, grew up in bigger city in northeast Poland, but lives in the capital now, says that Jarosław Kaczyński, who is the PiS party leader, is 'a very controversial person, and I am aware of it, and he is far from ideal, when it comes to the national consensus [pl. zgoda narodowa] or not inspiring divisions' (PL48Jacek30a). The semantic network analysis allowed us to have a more systematic look at the context in which people talk about polarisation and – in particular – who is to be blamed for it in their view. The results of this analysis for cultural-ideological polarisation, POLculid, are presented in Figure 6. It is no surprise that polarisation shows up in the semantic space of LGBT issues and the Catholic Church; it does however co-occur more frequently with the mentions of abortion (d= 17), cultural manipulation (CULman) (d= 14), and social media (d= 13). Predictably, it co-occurs also with political polarisation POLpol (d= 20). However, the most interesting result of this analysis is the discovery that the code that co-occurs most frequently with cultural-ideological polarisation is Law and Justice Party (d= 30), the ruling party. Its chief competitor, the Civic Platform Coalition is mentioned in the context of polarisation less frequently. Deliverable D2.7 Page 57 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Jacek, a journalist and a father of two who votes for the Law and Justice Party, shares his perspective on the state’s role in the life of its citizens. To him the state should provide ‘conditions for people to feel free and at ease to be able to live the same quality of life like in the West’, based on the ‘military and geopolitical security’ (PL48Jacek30a). Fundamentally, it should be simply run well, so it ‘functions well, and all benefit in the end’ (PL15Dawid30b), ‘like in a small company; the country is like a small company and one needs to know how to manage it’ (PL26Ania30b). Social welfare programs should be well thought through, not like the 500 PLUS program: ‘in a sense [it] is a positive move, but I somewhat think that money shouldn’t be given to the rich’ (PL23Krystyna50a).To summarise, the state should be a welfare state, but one that is organised in such a way that it ‘helps those who are not coping, but helps in a smart way’ (PL23Krystyna50a),16 by people who are well-qualified, secular experts, especially when it comes to healthcare by ‘an medical or scientific body of experts’ (01PLZuzanna20b). While social welfare belongs to the topics that are mentioned most frequently, the ideal state should also be an ‘enlightened, good democracy’ (PL37Andrzej50b), where the state ‘cares about the tripartite division of power’(PL23Krystyna50a), but is also not too top heavy, focused on local governance. Maks, a Ph.D. student in humanities, who has working class roots and is the first in this family to receive a higher education degree, shares: [My] first thought was that an ideal [governance] should be based on qualifications, on people, who are engaged and have some kind of background in third sector work. [...] I think, it is an ideal, towards which, against odds, even if what is now continues, that this governance will continue the evolution towards the governance based on dialogue, participation, and recognizing the needs of citizens. (PL12Maks30a) Another interviewee, Andrzej, who is a business psychologist in his late fifties, would like to see the local governments becoming the base of the political system in Poland: ‘unicameral parliament [...] with a chamber of local self-governments (pol. izba samorządowa), with, for example, representatives of, I don’t know, voivodeships, or something like that’ (PL37Andrzej50b).The role and importance of local authorities is an significant part of the experience of the state, the state that’s close to the people, especially when it comes to their role in building local communities and doing grassroots work: For example, one local administrative unit (pol. gmina), that is really pro-sports and pro-environmentalism, and the education they do works very well. More people get into running, take 16 Such a view of the proper function of the welfare state, not too large (‘Scandinavian’) yet not too small, is noted also by Sadura and Sierakowski (2019:66). They call this model ‘Bavarian’, as it combines social protection with conservative worldview. Deliverable D2.7 Page 64 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe part in some sport events, and the community gets activated. It’s not like school education, but like a generic one, locally. Picnics, flayers, talks, social media. The mayor is running so he is transferring his passion to his local community and it works, it changes [things]. (PL55Ola30a) Would strengthening local governments help make the state more “user friendly”? Flora thinks that not everything should be decided on the top state level: ‘I want things to be like that, when we are somewhere on the ground, in a particular place, we know what’s happening there, and Poland is quite diverse locally, because of the historical conditions, field conditions, natural resources, traditions, many reasons’ (PL58Flora30b).17 The idea of an ideal state that emerges from our analysis of the interviews is a vision of a state that’s humane throughout, both when it comes to its ability to provide various forms of care to its citizens, as well as being close to them through local governance. As another team of researchers observed: ‘When it comes to the views on the tasks the authorities should realise, the decisive majority of Poles takes a position close to the Catholic social doctrine and conservatism, identifying simultaneously with the anti-paternalistic heritage of liberalism’ (Rau et al 2018:161). What does make research participants value the state that is focused on the community, where authority is close to the people and not far away, vested in anonymous state officials and administrative bureaucracy? Let’s keep this question in mind for it might be answered in the next section. Meanwhile, let’s see how the respondents see the ideal features of politicians and political culture. 2.1.4.2. Politicians and the ideal of political culture Ideal political culture While conversations about an ideal state might take on a more abstract tone or involve questions that may prove difficult to be answered, questions about what qualities a politician or political culture should have and what values they should stand for seem to be a bit easier to engage with. What emerges from the interviews is condensed in the following list: ●society-oriented, society-sensitive, ‘especially in a country that was affected by all those years of brutal neoliberalism’ (PL48Jacek30a), ●being close to people and engaging in matters that matter to citizens, like supporting strikes, working with NGOs, being available to meet and listen to their voters, 17 In 2022, Poles trusted local governments twice as strongly as the executive branch of central government – 63% to 32% (CBOS, 2022a:8). Deliverable D2.7 Page 65 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe ●open, inclusive, tolerant and respectful, ‘not getting into the Polish-Polish war, which is now happening in Polish politics’ (PL16Lena20b), ●independent of networks of dependency and immune to corruption: ‘it cannot be, that ‘party people’ are chosen and again particular arrangements and circles are in power’, it should rather be a choice of a person ‘that is known to the society’, the community, to voters from their constituency (PL49Maciej60a), ●aspires to Western standards of governance, but is also cautious of novel worldviews and historical and cultural conditions of Polish reality, ●wants to help citizens, but is ‘not afraid to take unpopular decisions. In Poland we have the problem of the healthcare system [...]. No government wants to do what needs to be done’ (PL37Andrzej50b), ●expert qualifications for the job: ‘what I mean is that someone with head should be taking care of it, not a friend of a friend’ (PL35Konrad30b), ●not crystal clear, but active in shaping the direction of public debate (PL58Flora30b), ●must follow through with their promises, ‘it is detachment from reality, when all seems to be great, a politicians makes an appearance, supposedly is with the people during some meetings, supposedly listens to them, but there is no action that follows, it all ends with empty words’ (PL26Ania30b), ●focus on the people, not on the PR: ‘when a politician is asked why they changed their opinion on a topic and gives a very diplomatic answer, or dismisses the question, this results in anger in people, because they are not understood, listened to, because people need it’ (PL26Ania30b), ●locally-oriented: ‘if you are somewhere you know how it works and what they need, no detachment, where politics is its own thing, and life is also its own thing, and there is no coherence’ (PL26Ania30b). This detailed list of qualities our respondents expect to find in politics and politicians, as well as the catalogue of the latter’s obligations, take us to the topic of values in politics and their relationship with (mis)trust, which we discuss below. Here we begin with the one of the central values associated with democracy: freedom. Values, politics, and the politics of values: freedom Kamila, who is in her late twenties and works as a data administrator for a private company, says that her voting choices are based on the social matters that are important for her: ‘generally speaking, LGBT rights, women rights’ (PL29Kamila20b). Flora thinks that political choices are not about worldviews, but about values. ‘Values are like a lens of sorts, through which you look at the world, and impose categories of good and bad upon it. [...] It is just like that, that if you have strong values, a strong sense of ethics and if you deeply believe that abortion is bad always, then yes, if you are older and are repeating to yourself those words for the last 40 years [...], then you Deliverable D2.7 Page 66 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe have no space in your mind for an idea that other worldviews are good, because it is something very, very bad to you’ (PL58Flora30b). In order to make it clear what values research participants invoked to ground axiologically their political choices, we investigate them as they appear in the context of concrete matters. In the following paragraphs, we will discuss how research participants speak about the value of freedom, or liberty, in both its classical forms, positive and negative. The concept of negative liberty, discussed at length by Berlin (1969), in the simplest of words means the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. In the Polish context, “freedom from” has been construed as freedom from the communist system of power, pandemic restrictions, obligatory vaccinations, or human irrationality/nature. The pandemic has brought temporary restrictions to mobility, which eventually turned into long-term constraints that caused a broad economic crisis and the failure of the healthcare system. Maciek, a far-right voter and a farmer in his mid-thirties, says 'the pandemic will have a very negative, long-term effect on us. And the covid problem is nothing, compared to lockdowns and restrictions, of which effects we will need to address in the future' (PL42Maciek30a). The libertarian take on the value of “freedom from” in the pandemic context relates to the unwanted state interventionism and obligatory vaccination policies. Maciej, who is a 60+ Polish migrant to Austria and a driver, says ‘here it’s all about our own decision about our bodies which, of course, can be seen as like “not about your body, because you are infecting [others]”... but no’ (PL49Maciej60a). Outside of the pandemic, some right-wing voters also seek such “freedom from” in the area of economic liberties that should be standard in ‘Free Poland’ (pol. Wolna Polska), as the post-1989 3rd Republic of Poland is commonly called by older generations. Interestingly, here is where the voters of libertarian right-wing Konfederacja differ from most voters of the interventionist-welfarist right-wing Law and Justice Party (PiS). Research participants, who vote for either of those parties, might find a common ground in championing conservative moral values, but their views on economic matters are quite different. Not being exactly on the opposite side of the spectrum, as PiS didn’t introduce higher corporate or property ownership taxes, which the Left is advocating for, Konfederacja strongly pushes for the lowering of the taxes and curtailing the scope of social welfare, even openly supporting tax avoidance [REF Mentzen], as it sees ‘tax increase and obligatory fees as an attempt to curb freedom and entrepreneurship, a punishment for hard work’ (PL27Piotrek20b). Meanwhile, Alicja, a Law and Justice Party voter in her early 30 years with conservative Christian values, says: 'For me, the social support [for children] indeed is Deliverable D2.7 Page 67 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe support because I see how much of money is being taken from me through taxes. Meaning, I am taking back what was taken from my husband in taxes and various other fees' (PL31Alicja30a). Those research participants who vote for the Civic Platform party or the Left, hope to get back ‘Free Poland’ and their own version of “freedom from”, if the ruling party loses its power. ‘Now after what happened 7 years ago, we are being controlled by a right-wing party, which makes me really angry and restricts my freedom, and I hate it’, says Krystyna, a journalist in her early fifties. When I asked her, in what ways PiS restricts her freedom, she explained at length: Firstly, I don’t like all forms of instigation against LGBT people, refugees. For the past couple of years I have worked with refugees. Since 2016 I have been helping in an initiative called the Children from the Brześć Railway station. During the first [refugee] crisis in 2016, when it happened, PiS attacked the refugees and created [this atmosphere]…When Chechen mothers were stuck on the border in Brześć, it was a tragedy to me, and that’s why I decided to get involved in helping. [What angers me is] mostly that the ruling party is spreading hatred. As a lawyer [by education] I was really feeling through all those attacks on the judiciary, on the Constitutional Court. What was really getting to me are the restrictions of the judiciary power and distroyal of it. That this power is going to be subjected to politicians. PL23Krystyna50a Such “freedom from” in both of those contexts seems to be quintessentially a freedom from what the respondents perceive as mistakes of those in power, of the medical, scientific or political authorities. Moreover, people seem to be concerned not only with actual but also potential mistakes.18 The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines positive liberty as a freedom to act, as the presence of the possibility of acting ((2003) 2021). This form of liberty can be usefully studied in the Polish context since the right-wing government introduced controversial changes to the abortion law that took place in the fall of 2020 and in the early 2021. The topic of abortion was broadly discussed by some of the interviewees, who expressed their need to have the freedom to choose abortion. Halina, a left-wing supporter in her early thirties, asks me: ‘I remember all that fuss about the mask wearing, that it is an attack on freedoms…and it’s not an attack on freedom to be forced to be pregnant?’ (PL52Halina30a). Nadia, who is an 18-years old high school student from the northwest of Poland sees the matter differently: ‘I understand the issue in such a way, that some issues…that 18 This situation is fittingly encapsulated by Anthony Giddens’s concept of reflexive modernization, characterised, among others, by the decline of trust in traditional authorities claiming to be always right (1994). Deliverable D2.7 Page 68 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe one is for freedom, for the freedom of choice, somewhat, let’s say that all humans are equal, and that the youth needs to be educated on certain topics, like sexual education, but…not in the direction of extremes, like having a million sexual orientations, or opting for a certain sexual orientation as a matter of fashion, or having an abortion like it is shopping for bread’ (PL28Nadia18). In those two interview fragments we can see a clash of ideas of what positive liberty should be when it comes to abortion. The topic brings to light other sets of values, associated with specific conceptions of human rights; it is also related to the tension and debate between two worldviews, liberal and conservative. Wiktoria, whose mother was a left libertarian and brought her up to accept the right to abortion as a human right, points out: ‘I understand that someone may have different views, but if they don’t want to do it let them not do it…I mean…I know it might sound Spartan, but it’s not the state that pays for a disabled child to be born. Because neither the parent contributes to the GDP, neither the child will. Secondly, the child will be doomed to suffer, and if the parent dies before it dies, then it’s totally doomed to life in an institution’ (PL39Wiktoria30a). Bruno, in his late twenties who is more of a centrist voter, thinks that ‘religion shouldn’t have influence when it comes to topics related to abortion’ (PL30Bruno20b). ‘Thank God in our country freedom of speech still applies’, Maciek, a far-right voters joyfully highlights, before adding: ‘However, if you would like to conduct research on the eventual negative influence of the sex change procedure on children, then I think you could have had problems at the university. It makes me laugh, truly, because during the Civic Platform Party’s rule the Central Anticorruption Bureau went to the Wprost newspaper headquarters and tried to block printing of an article that discriminated them’, but with the PiS in power nobody is gagging anybody’ (PL42Maciek30a). The ‘freedom to’ in the words of some research participants seems to be a lack of restrictions that would preclude the possibility of certain actions. When asked about changes the systemic transition in the 1990s and the joining of the EU brought to their lives, some people would point towards an increase in freedoms, understood as a theoretical increase in the number of possibilities. Entering the Union ‘was a clear step forward: investments, possibility to travel, possibility to work anywhere. The freedom’ (PL37Andrzej50b). The overall positive assessment of the Polish membership in the EU, well documented in international comparative surveys (see, for example, Fagan and Gubballa 2022), is confirmed by our semantic network analysis: already at the level of co-occurrence higher than 6, the code for the EU is associated only with such ‘positive’ phenomena as the freedom of movement and the new infrastructure. Deliverable D2.7 Page 69 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe To Antoni (PL50Antoni70a) the systemic transition was ‘a joy of getting the freedom back, the free media, and most importantly, the free work, the free media, and free elections, [...][where] we could select whoever we wanted. [...] We were the prototype, which created democracy inside the Communist Bloc. [It was] a unique phenomenon on a global scale. Contrary to what’s happening today, where we are going back to the totalitarian country inside the family of free nation-states’. To others, the freedom associated with the democratic state after the systemic change was about freedom to be Polish, to vote for ‘pro-Polish parties, because Poland was too long under Russia’ (PL32Marek30b). When it comes to the question of values, semantic network analysis allows us to see how the topic of freedom (code general freedom) is linked to other concepts recorded in the dataset. The code ‘general freedom’ is linked to ‘imaging the future’ code via ‘Poland’, ‘pandemic’, and ‘young people’. The latter is also directly linked to ‘tolerance’. ‘Need for simplicity’ is connected to ‘general freedom’ through the most frequent code of the network, the code for the Law and Justice party. The visualisation suggests that the young generation seeks freedom and tolerance, and hopes for the future to provide it. Deliverable D2.7 Page 70 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Figure 9: The codes for general freedom,imagining the future,need for simplicity and tolerance and their neighbours. Only edges supported by at least four informants are shown ( ). 𝑏≥4 The respondents who associate freedom with the pandemic and the far right political party ‘Konfederacja’, are predominantly male (over 50%). There is another semantic network detectable in the participants' discourse on freedom. Prevalent among female participants (more than 50% of respondents), it connects freedom with abortion (no doubt what we see here is women’s reaction to the draconian pregnancy termination laws), women’s rights, and the government’s detachment from the populace (code SIestranged). Both genders, more or less in equal measure, see freedom in the context of social inequality and its relation to such key institutions as the ruling Law and Justice Party, and the Catholic Church. Interestingly, the latter is also linked with the code ‘tolerance’. To understand what it means, we need to go back to the interview data, as the graph doesn’t tell us whether the code’s links refer to the Church’s lack of tolerance, or its support for tolerance. Ethnographic data Deliverable D2.7 Page 71 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe shows that the former is the case: the Church is invoked as an institution that falls short in its support of tolerance. Here is a fragment of our conversation with Ignacy, a paramedic in training who votes for the centre-liberal Nowoczesna: Ignacy: The next issue is the issue of culture. I am very open and tolerant; differences are to me something completely normal. Those are the laws of nature. No one is exactly the same. Sure, there’s naturally going to be the hetero majority, but there are also people who are homo, people who are nonbinary and trans people. It’s normal and if other species were also as developed as we [humans] are, things would be the same. Among primates there is a lot of homosexuality, there is nothing unnatural about it. And what the Law and Justice party is trying to persuade [everybody], I have a brother in primary school, is that it’s unnatural, evil, bad. Interviewer: During biology classes? Ignacy: No, during the [Catholic] religion lessons. But what I know about the textbooks…Those politics in school, [the narrative the state-recommended textbooks spread is] that Poland is great, it’s the best. It really annoys me. [They say] that Poland is without a fault. Well now, Poland has a great deal of faults and a difficult history, hence saying that we are without guilt, the chosen nation, or something along those lines, it really truly upsets me. This isn’t true. [Because of that] a generation of nationalists will grow up. What I am worried about the most is that Poland will cease to be…till recently [historically] it was seen as an open and tolerant country, and [it’s on the way] to become the backwater of Europe. Ignacy worries that tolerance is marginalised in the set of values taught in many Polish schools. He points out, In the history textbooks for decades Polish students were taught that in the past, for example, in the 16th century or in the 1920’s, Poland was a tolerant nation state, welcoming both ethnic and religious minorities. To Ignacy, PiS is promoting a different narrative, where tolerance isn’t an important value, and the Catholic Church is supporting those efforts. In Poland’s public education system, the Church is solely responsible for preparing and carrying out religious instruction, including the lessons’ content and the choice of teachers. Contrary to what the name of the class might suggest, the religion class isn’t a class that talks about different religions, it just teaches about the Christian Catholic faith. Interestingly, the Centre for Public Opinion Research (pl. Centrum BadańOpinii Społecznej), a non-governmental research organisation, which for decades now has studied social and cultural trends, has recently published results of its study amongst all students of 440 public educational institutions in Warsaw. The study, based on the surveys involving 133,000 primary school, high-school and technical schools students (CBOS, 2022c) was conducted in October 2021. The results paint a sad picture of the Church’s popularity Deliverable D2.7 Page 72 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe among the youth. Three decades ago, in a similar study conducted by CBOS almost three out of four respondents aged 18-24 declared to be regular churchgoers (1992). Among those aged 17-19, 93% percent attended religion classes. Today, in the same age group only 30,9% declared the same, while among the primary school students it’s 67,7%. Studies conducted in other large cities across the country show similar trends. To a various degree, younger generations seem to be turning away from the Catholic Church. After exploring the link between freedom, tolerance, and the Catholic Church, as these topics are discussed by some of our respondents and analysed in an influential survey, we return to the semantic network encapsulating ‘general freedom.’ As Visualisation 4 shows, freedom is a concern for young people, and many people worry about the protection of freedom during the pandemic. However, the nodes that are most deeply associated with ‘freedom’ are ‘physical well being,’ ‘women’s rights,’ and ‘abortion.’ The edge connecting ‘general freedom’ to ‘abortion’ is the deepest of all edges incident to the former code ( ).The bright orange colour of the edge 𝑑=7 indicates that the informants supporting this association are all females. Male informants do not appear to associate freedom equally strongly with anything. Deliverable D2.7 Page 73 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe A look at the gender difference in participant responses suggests that the topic lockdown was of importance to the majority of interviewees, as the proportions between male and female participants (respectively, orange and green links between nodes) corresponds with the gender balance of the study. However, different issues related to the lockdown topic were interesting to the two genders represented in the study. Based on an overview of narrative codes, men spoke more about pandemic protests, vaccinations, EU involvement, conspiracy theories, conflict and the role of scientific explanation. Women spoke more often about anti-rationalism, parenting during the pandemic, lack of state support and incompetence of the ruling Law and Justice party, worries about the future, expressing fear and a sense of confusion. Male and female narratives on pandemic lockdowns seem to differ in the area of interviewee’s primary focus. Male respondents were thinking more in terms of the political and economic aspects of the pandemic, while female respondents were reflecting more on its social aspect. The topic of low quality of health services was, however, of more interest to female participants of the study, who discussed it in the context of the broader condition of the Polish state in a pandemic reality. According to them, the state, weakened by the inability of politicians to respond to the pandemic crisis adequately, is bringing about the worsening of the economy, which might lead to further privatisation of healthcare services, and hence, its further inaccessibility to low-income earners. 2.1.4.3. Political disillusionment While sharing their thoughts on state malfunctioning, research participants were also expressing views on the current political system. An analysis of the Czech fieldwork brought some interesting insights into how the far-right voters are perceiving their state, suggesting that while there is a sense of disappointment in the political systems, which manifests in a strong disaffection towards state institutions, those sentiments do not mean there is a similar feeling towards democracy in general. However, while some of the Czech study participants see a pressing need for improvements to the current political system, pointing out a variety of issues that should be tended to, their critique, while constructive, is also characterised by cynicism, distrust and non-belief. In the case of the Polish part of the study, similar sentiments can be found among research participants. Here also even those interviewees who declared to be active voters in both local and state elections are critical of the political system. Interestingly, similarly to the Czech far-right study participants, they are as disaffected with particular state institutions as they are with the entire political culture of the country. They express more generalised reflections, which seem to reflect a deep sense of political disillusionment with all political options. Deliverable D2.7 Page 80 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Despite the fact that almost all participants are active voters, and despite the fact that each represents a unique and diverse set of political views, they all are very critical of politicians, both the currently ruling party and the opposition. When asked ‘do you feel you have a representation among politicians today?’, many of them would answer ‘no, not really, but I vote anyway, because what else is left?’. The critique of the particular politicians or parties can be divided into four categories: ●mishandling of the office as lack of qualifications, for example: Konrad, a graphic designer in his late thirties, shares: ‘it really upsets me when…I am really upset by the government's decisions that are not well-thought through, from which they then have to next withdraw’ (PL35Konrad30b). ●mishandling of the office as corruption, for example: Andrzej, a business psychologist, thinks that the ruling Law and Justice Party is destroying the local government financially: ‘It’s a very simple method. [...] They take from the rich and give to the poor, but THEIR poor. For example, they take from a city like Tricity, and it’s all public, and everybody knows about it, and they give that money to… Dębica. Where there is a PiS clique’. (PL37Andrzej50b). Ignacy, a paramedic trainee in his early twenties, who votes for Konfederacja, compares corruption and mismanagement of the current and the previous ruling party: When it comes to economic issues, there’s an entire load of scams. It used to be that during the Tusk era there were more scams, but now PiS has beat them ten times over. During the Tusk era those scams were small, image-based, but today I feel “a next scam, again, ah well”, an indifference of sorts towards what the government is doing. (PL19Ignacy20a). Ignacy’s views on corruption seem to be quite common, as is illustrated in Figure 13 that shows associations between ‘corruption’ and the three major institutions of public life in Poland: the Catholic Church, Law and Justice Party (currently ruling) and Civic Platform (previously dominant, led by Donald Tusk). Deliverable D2.7 Page 81 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Figure 13: The deepest associations with political corruption (DDpolcor). For all edges shown, . 𝑑> 12 When the minimum level of association is decreased to 6 (such that for all edges), we observe a truly 𝑑>6 important set of associations. Political corruption co-occurs not only with the three major public actors, but also with the arguably most negative feature of public life: polarisation. Its two forms, cultural-ideological (‘POLculid’) and political (‘POLpol’), are central in the semantic field surrounding political corruption. At the minimum, this means that in people’s minds corruption and polarisation, two phenomena detrimental for liberal democracy, tend to coexist. Deliverable D2.7 Page 82 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Figure 14: The deepest associations with political corruption (DDpolcor). For all edges shown, 𝑑> 6 ●dishonesty, for example: Ewa, an IT specialist in her late twenties who used to live many years abroad, thinks that the Law and Justice Party are manipulative and have a (not so) secret deal with the Church, who helps them get the votes: ‘I think PiS [...] has a deal with the Church, which gets them a lot of votes, and in the same time PiS uses a fear tactic to manipulate, [...] so I think they are playing dirty, and [their position] is a thing of great manipulation and great propaganda, an taking care of the people [in the country], for whom nobody else cared for’ (PL53Ewa20b). Tadeusz, an addiction therapist who lives in the lubuskie voivodeship, shares his deep disappointment in a politician he voted for in the last parliamentary elections: ‘Now, actually, I don’t have anybody [to vote for], I am devastated. I mean, I remember, my last hopes were with Mr. Kukiz. I remember the way he seduced me, the way he charmed me, and how delighted I was with everything Mr. Kukiz was saying. So, I agreed with him, maybe not Deliverable D2.7 Page 83 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe with everything [he says], but I was in agreement with him on many issues. And so his priorities, his flagship slogans were very close to me. And I have an impression that all of that has been compromised, and I now feel left abandoned. (PL34Tadeusz40a). ●communist-like politics, for example: ‘Back to the past, it’s what the current government is giving us. Because they don’t know a different world, so they are trying to do the People’s Polish Republic BiS. The etatism, which the ruling party shows us, it’s naive, it’s 19-century-like, and very primitive. It looks like socialism, national socialism, like what we had in the PRL. (PL36Mateusz40b) The critique of a single party or a politician goes hand in hand with a shared sense of mistrust towards the political class in general. Some interviewees criticise the sole existence of ‘professional politicians’ (PL15Dawid30b), who have no alternatives to working as a politician. If not elected to an office they will seek employment in state institutions or state-owned enterprises, using connections rather than the merit of their expertise to secure a position. ‘I think this is what people holding a political position need to deal with’, Ania, an white-collar worker in her late thirties notes. ‘Arrangements big and small, own interests, not looking further than a tip of one’s own nose, trying to gain something out of the society…it really hurts and is the biggest obstacle [ouf our political culture]’ (PL26Ania30b).Another interviewee, Olek, an IT developer in his late twenties, bitterly points out: ‘A politician makes a career not by actually wanting to change things, but by looking like wanting to change things’. A real, actual need to bring in changes is not necessary, if one keeps up does appearances long enough to gain a strong position, but then ‘if there was any intention to bring change to begin with, it gets weaker, because people are afraid to lose their position’ (PL45Olek20b). Paweł, who recently moved out of Poland, shares that one of the reasons for leaving was the ‘Polish reality’ (pol. rzeczywistość polska): ‘It doesn’t look good to me’, he notes, ‘there are so many scandals that we have already forgotten about, a billion lost in Ostrołęka, to billions given to the TVP’ (PL13Pawel30b). Kamila, who works for the army and is in her late twenties, notes: ‘I am surprised, like, all that scandals are exposed and nothing is happening, no one is being held responsible. I have an impression they [the politicians] are above the rules, above the law’, adding next: ‘I have this feeling of great dirt in all that. The politicians have this impression, and actually we can say they are right, that they are above the law. I don’t like it at all, I am expecting higher standards of work, and higher moral standards among [them]. When asked by me, if that makes her not want to vote, she answers: ‘No. What is left, really? I don’t have many options to have a Deliverable D2.7 Page 84 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe direct influence [on politics], so I go and vote’ (PL29Kamila20b). Lena, also in her late twenties, is a food safety expert, whose parents are working-class small-scale farmers. She has lost all hope for the political class to actually represent the people: Politicians say what we [the voters] want to hear, they only care for their own interests, irrespective of the party they belong to. Those have that target group, others have other target groups, but when it comes to [doing their job], they only make sure they have it best, not the society, which they should be representing (PL16Lena20b). Semantic network analysis of topics raised throughout the ethnographic data set shows that the codes the two leading parties, the Law and Justice Party and the Civic Platform Party, have in common, all represent notions of dissatisfaction with the political culture. The visualisation below shows that both parties were involved in scandals (code political scandals), corruption (code DDpolcor), narrative manipulations (code CULman), and contribute to growing social inequality (code LAinadequette), while their politicians are incompetent and polarising in their public commentary (code POLpol), both politically and culturally (code POLculid). Deliverable D2.7 Page 85 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Figure 15: The codes for the Law and Justice and Civic Platform Coalition parties and their neighbours. Only the broadest edges are shown ( . 𝑏>3) A closer look at how gender differences impact the visualisation presented in Figure 15 helps to identify different priorities of males and females. Female respondents (orange lines) have talked more about such topics as abortion protests (codes protests and abortion), separation of the state and the Church (code Rsepar), the political effect on women’s rights (code women's rights), and healthcare accessibility and quality (codes HSlowqual and HSaccess). Male respondents were, on the other hand, focusing on topics such as political conflict (code conflict), scandal (code political scandal), polarisation (code POLpol), clearly referring to more abstract problems, rather than pragmatic, everyday (in the present situation) concerns. Topics that both genders would brought up related to social welfare programs (codes 500+) or more general concerns associated with political dissatisfaction, such as the role of Polish Catholicism (code of the same name) or long-term effects of the Deliverable D2.7 Page 86 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe post-socialist transformation in the 1990s (code victims of post-socialist transformation). A common notion that contributes to political disillusionment is the sense of a lack of representation. While some politicians have their reputation devastated by scandals, others seem to have ‘too radical views’ (PL34Tadeusz40a). Halina, in her early thirties, shares: I am wondering and I don’t know…I have a generic impression that politicians represent…What I mean is that politicians, who have different tires of power, starting with local government structures to the national ones, have an entirely different vision that I have, completely different, which I cannot at all understand in the long run. They don’t want to work with society…They don’t care. They only care about their own interests, their own finances, for example, making it, playing to their own benefit, and not for the people, who feed them [with the taxes] and who are dependent on them. (PL52Halina30a) Others see all politicians as thieves and liars, and refrain from voting: ‘I think there are many people like me. One third of the country doesn’t take part in the elections’ (PL59Miroslaw40b). The Centre for Public Opinion Research (pol. Centrum BadańOpinii Społecznej, CBOS), which regularly carries out survey studies, provides additional evidence on the declining trust of the public in the political elite. Their study on social trust, conducted in early February 2020 among a representative, randomised sample of adult Poles, shows that over a half of respondents (56%) declares lack of trust in political parties (CBOS, 2020). The government is almost equally trusted (46%) and not trusted (45%), while both chambers of the Polish parliament are more often not trusted (45%), then trusted (33%). Moreover, in November 2022, 68% of the surveyed saw the situation of the country as heading in the wrong direction (CBOS, 2022e). The negative assessment of the situation in the country remained above 50% since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. 2.1.4.4. Towards a summary: trust and mistrust Martyna, an IT specialist in her late thirties who recently moved back to her countryside hometown in central Poland, when asked about how she sees her country’s future, she answers: It is a very difficult question, honestly, I don’t know. It’s going all towards the doom. [I am joking], but it looks bad. In the next few years, I do hope that something will change. That the people who were elected, if they open their eyes and come outside of their bubble…I think they all remain in their Deliverable D2.7 Page 87 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe bubbles and they overlook issues important to the average breadwinner. (PL44Martyna30b) The analysis of the Polish ethnographic data suggests that the condition of political culture in Poland is assessed negatively and this contributes to a generalised negative view of Polish society among our research participants. The disparity, between what the state should be and what it actually is, is – in their view – pronounced. How will the growing dissatisfaction with the political scene, or even the political culture in Poland, influence the future of the democratic state? Is democracy in danger? Survey studies show that the support for democracy as a system in the last few years (say, 2015-21) is relatively high in Poland (CBOS 2021c), particularly among the young people (Babraj 2021). Also the assessment of the functioning of democracy in the country was relatively high from 2018 to July 2020, as positive views were more frequent than the negative ones. However, one of the 2021 CBOS surveys revealed that between July 2020 and April 2021, this assessment turned negative. The percentage of the people satisfied with the performance of democracy declined from 49% to 38%, while the percentage of the unsatisfied increased from 44% to 52% (CBOS 2021c). This is the period that roughly corresponds with our qualitative study whose results are reported here and which show a rather unhappy populace. For example, our conversations have revealed the existence of a strong sense of mistrust towards the state and its various representatives. As we have argued earlier, the pandemic may have something to do with this rather pronounced reversal. Since Simmel (1950), at least, trust is regarded as the fundament of a society, allowing its members to turn their back on each other, without a fear of consequences (Sztompka 1999). Various levels and applications of trust result in a variety of forms social relations take. Historians and political scientists study trust in its relation to the self-legitimising efforts of the government in a democratic state (Hardin 2002, Hosking 2014). Weber and Tilly see trust as a relational quality, which gradually expanded from immediate family circle to state institutions, allowing for the functioning of legal structures within the modern state (Weber 1947, Tilly 2005). Carey distinguishes between ‘mistrust’ and ‘distrust’, defining the first more as ‘a general sense of the unreliability of a person or thing’, and the latter as ‘based on a specific past experience’ (Carey, 2017:8). If we were to apply those definitions to the dataset, both sentiments were expressed by research participants. Left-lining interviewees point towards the pandemic as a focal point that uncovered pathologies of the current government, but the analysis of Polish history suggests that anti-government sentiments are long present in public discourses. Social policies of the ruling Law and Justice Party are perceived by left voters positively because they address the so-called common man, but those voters also point towards the country being torn between different Deliverable D2.7 Page 88 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe groups of interests, be it political or economic. Other interviews point towards scandals that involved other parties’ members, or a more generalised malfunction of the state –the cardboard state. 2.1.5. Network analysis and visualisation summary The use of a mix method approach, that marries qualitative and quantitative approaches, can be of great use in the analysis of complex data sets. In this study the dataset consists of transcribed interviews, of which text was coded using a previously built codebook. The fundament of the analysis presented in this chapter is a qualitative, ethnographic analysis, that looks at main motives that emerge from the empirical material. Relations between the codes, that represent topics raised during in-depth interviews, such as various phenomena, events, social agents, institutions and affects, was analysed using semantic network analysis method, that is based on two methods – algorithmic analysis and network visualisation. In the case of the Polish data set, which represents a mental map constructed on the basis of in-depth interviews with diverse set of research participants,, the application of SNA allowed us to observe three otherwise “hidden” phenomena: ●A broader view – network analysis and visualisation allow an ethnographer to have a broader look at the dataset, providing an opportunity for a top-down, systematic examination of the entire body of text. This way the topics that were mentioned most often (as most connected nodes) could be spotted and compared across the three language communities ●Gender comparison – by making a note of which topics were mentioned more often by which gender, the network analysis allowed us to identify gender-based differences in narratives, helping to spot them, if there were any, a task that’s a challenge for a qualitative-narrative analysis alone. ●Unexpected connections – the networked representations of our data, observed at different levels of reduction, allowed us to see connections between topics that were otherwise not visible when a standard narrative analysis was conducted. The SNA proved to be particularly useful in analysis of the Polish dataset, helping to see through its complexity. Study participants represent diverse views on a variety of matters. Network visualisations provided a very insightful top view on the relationship between narratives around the Law and Justice Party and the Civic Platform Party. Gender visualisations unveiled significant differences in how the two genders represented in the study see issues related to major themes that emerged in qualitative analysis – freedom, polarisation, the pandemic’s social impact and political dissatisfaction. Without the semantic network analysis the hidden relationship between Deliverable D2.7 Page 89 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe (kupónovka) proposed by Václav Klaus, the federal minister of finance at the time, was based on the idea that 'everybody could participate by buying vouchers to become a shareholder in the newly established privatization funds' (Slacalek and Sitera 2022: 138) with the objective of creating a previously non-existent Czech capitalist class. In practice the process was carried out in a questionable and an extremely non-transparent manner. Towards the end of the nineties, evidence of many economic crimes, including multiple instances of severe fraud and large scale stripping of state assets by private companies (tunelování) surfaced in the public discourse. The legitimacy of the political regime, which played a central role in the facilitation of these processes, deteriorated considerably. The corruption associated with the privatization period set the basis for many more cases of state capture in years to come (on privatization and its woes see Myant and Drahokoupil 2013, Myant 2003, Eyal 2000; 2003). Another milestone which substantially worsened the citizen perception of the political regime and its corrupt nature was the Opposition Agreement signed between the two largest parties in the parliament – ČSSD (Czech Social Democratic Party) and ODS (Civic Democratic Party). This political deal (1998–2002) included a provision according to which: 'ODS would allow ČSSD to govern alone as a minority government. In return, ODS would receive a number of parliamentary posts and the two parties would together adopt several constitutional amendments' (Roberts 2010: 1273). The opposition agreement was seen by many as the culmination of crony capitalism and corruption (Slacalek and Sitera 2022: 139), with the critics highlighting its negative consequences for democracy, national stability and constitutional functioning of the state. The implementation of the Opposition Agreement provoked a series of large-scale protests, whose participants coined a slogan ‘Thank you, now go’, aimed at the leaders of the transition period (ibid.). Against the background of the steadily increasing number of corruption scandals, involving the majority of the mainstream political parties from the right to the left, the Opposition Agreement further discredited the political class as internally corrupt and driven by pure self-interest. The compromised ČSSD, which figured prominently in many corruption scandals, was replaced by the ODS-led government in 2006. The ensuing period of the ODS rule, which came to an end in 2013 with the dissolving of the prime minister Nečas’ cabinet and the arrest of several of his top associates charged with ‘state capture’ corruption, only fortified the already existing public disillusionment. This corruption scandal was particularly unsettling as it took place during a period of severe austerity measures (following the 2008 GFC) with the public repeatedly reminded by the political elite about the need to ‘tighten the belts’. What is more, the ‘Palermo’ style Czech politics prepared the ground for the rise of the populist oligarch Andrej Babiš, who gained popularity Deliverable D2.7 Page 96 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe thanks to his strong anti-corruption rhetoric combined with 'technocratic centrism against traditional party politics' (Slačálek 2022: 164). Discussion For the majority of our study’s Czech participants, political corruption figures as a key factor behind their political disillusionment. Kralova would hear the ‘corruption narrative’ while talking to people from the working class and the underclass20, such as Ludvik (20b) who lives in the Moravian-Silesian Region and works there as a volunteer firefighter: 'A normal person with a brain can see that this political mess has been here for many years. It was not Babiš’ invention. Every government in this country that has been in power since the transition has left behind a series of frauds, scandals…they’ve been stealing from the people –each and every one of them' (06ludvik20b). I would also hear it from participants of secured middle class and emerging cosmopolitan class backgrounds. Radek (50a) who works as a regional manager in an international corporation feels equally disillusioned: 'They (the politicians) then slide into the routine and start to take advantage of their position for their own interest. They learn how to ‘walk in it’ and their efficacy decreases and they become more prone to corruption' (04radek50a). And the same picture was painted to me by those already retired, who spent a significant part of their lives living under the socialist regime and vividly remembered the transition period. Robert (60b) a former miner from the Ostravský region is very critical of the way in which the closure and privatisation of the state-owned mines has been carried out; 'I will tell you, they really messed it up. When transition happened, they came here and started spreading their capitalist smart talk. They shut down the mines and they got loads and loads of money from it. They literally looted this state. They stole whatever they could' (0222robert60b). 20 For the class designation used in this paper (which I approximated based on the research participants’ narratives of their living conditions), I am using the framework suggested by Prokop et al. (2019). In their study, the authors looked at class formation in the Czech Republic since the postsocialist transition and came up with a holistic approach to class which takes into consideration variations of economic, social and cultural capitals. Their typology of 6 key classes includes the secured middle class (high levels of income, home property ownership, social and cultural capital – the richest and most secure of all classes), the emerging cosmopolitan class (high levels of economic, social and cultural capital, however lesser rates of home property ownership, knowledge of languages, IT which means higher opportunities at the globalising job market), the traditional working class (decent levels of economic capital and home property ownership, lesser social and cultural capital and high risk employment) the class of local ties (high social capital and home property ownership, strong local community ties, lower levels of economic capital, decreasing opportunities at the globalised job market), the endangered/precarious class (low economic capital and low levels of home property ownership, however fairly high social capital (social connections), lower opportunities at the globalised job market) and the deprived class (low levels of economic, social and cultural capital, high rates of over-indebtedness, unqualified workers and unemployment). Click here for a detailed description. Deliverable D2.7 Page 97 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Did the perception of state corruption affect our participants’ political ideas and actions? Certainly. While Radek does not even feel like participating in the parliamentary elections, he will eventually go to 'prevent the worst political scenario' (04radek50a). Robert, the former miner, feels utterly disillusioned and has not gone to vote in the parliamentary elections since the socialist times. Ludvik on the other hand, will probably cast his vote to one of the newer political parties Přísaha, which criticises the traditional political parties, corruption and clientelism – a campaigning strategy very similar to that which brought Andrej Babiš’ ANO to power. The notion of the formal political arena as inherently corrupt thus further encourages citizens to look for alternatives, including anti-systemic parties and protest movements. These subjects and their representatives are often also very successful in bridging the perceived gap between ‘the people’ and the political elite. This is explained by Stela (30a), who is a representative of the emerging cosmopolitan class with progressive political leanings and who works as a fantasy sci fi writer: Babišwas actively spending time among the people and giving them things, even if it was a stupid ‘kobliha’ (typical Czech pastry that Babišwas giving out in Prague metro during his first election campaign). He did things that were visible. And he also made a brilliant use of social media. He was sharing popular views at the time, like “there is so much corruption, let’s bring these thieves (politicians of the traditional parties) to jail”. (07stela30a) The ability of a political leader to use their personal and communication styles to evoke authenticity and resemble the ‘commoner’ has been identified by many scholars as one of the central features of successful populist politics (Laclau 2005, Brubaker 2017, Cassulo 2020). The same applies to the Czech context, where the notion of the estrangement from the political class is particularly pertinent. The following account of Nela (20a), a university student who works part-time in a hospital Covid ward well illustrates this recurring sentiment: And the politicians…my father told me how much salary they receive…an average of 80 thousand crowns per month (almost 3 x the average Czech salary). They have their private chauffeur, secretaries and paid lunches in luxury restaurants. And when you watch them online (during parliamentary live streams) how during the sessions they do nothing and are always on their phones…that’s just terrible. (03nelaa20a) As it was revealed throughout this section, finding alternatives within the existing political configuration and particularly among the traditional political parties becomes increasingly unappealing and difficult. Large section of the society adopts the strategy of voting for ‘lesser evil’, because as they explained, they feel it is their citizen Deliverable D2.7 Page 98 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe obligation to participate in the elections. In the fieldwork context, this occurred on several occasions. When I talked to Sara (50a), about her electoral choices, she instantly responded: 'For sure I will go vote, it is a necessity. As I said, I’d be surprised if the elections were not fraudulent (zkorumpovaný) but we will go' (08sara50a). In another conversation with Nela (20a), who I just quoted above, she raised an interesting point about young peoples’ relationship to parliamentary elections: 'Well us young people we are really being ‘lynched’ for not voting', she continues by explaining her own approach, 'I personally go, even though I don't understand much of what's going on and I don't even like any of the parties. It seems to be that it’s all a bit of fraud (zkorumpovaný) and that in the end it won't have any impact' (03nelaa20a). Others opt out from the elections completely and a growing number shift their sympathies to new anti-system or protest movements and parties, often of populist nature. As the proceeding section illustrates, the COVID-19 crisis further amplified such trends by introducing new political subjects on the political scene. 2.2.2.3. Re-politicisation in times of crisis According to the literature, political disaffection tends to intensify when politicians appear not to respond to citizens’ demands and fail to represent their interests, often in times of economic or political crises. To the realm of political disaffection, Linek includes in the realm of political disaffection also a subcategory of individual disaffection which encompasses the belief that politics is unimportant, incomprehensive and inaccessible, resulting in disengaged and disinterested citizens (Linek 2016: 59). This however was not the case in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, which in fact had often become the main catalyst for the politicisation of many of the participants with whom Kralova spoke. As Rudolf (30a) observed: 'I was always living my comfortable life, we would go on trips with my son –a normal life. I wasn’t interested in politics. Only last year in May 2021 I started getting curious and then in October it completely opened my eyes and I started getting active (in the anti-covid movement)' (06rudolf30a). Rudolf is from the Karlovy Vary region, which during the pandemic reported one of the highest numbers of Covid-related deaths. It has always been one of the country’s economically less developed areas, and the pandemic has only made things worse for those trying to make ends meet. For Rudolf, the prolonged closure of schools forced him to reduce his working hours in order to assist his seven year old son (who he has in shared custody) with online schooling. The closure of schools and the subsequent deterioration of mental (and physical) health of many children (including Rudolf’s son) is what instigated Rudolf to start campaigning around these issues. Deliverable D2.7 Page 99 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Another research participant Sara (50a) lost her job during the pandemic because of a downsizing at her workplace. She had started to take interest in the various online ‘anti-covid’ groups because of a friend, who started sending her links to various groups and websites. Initially, Sara was genuinely scared of the spread and health risks of the virus and followed the recommended restrictions. But gradually, as the government’s everchanging measures became less and less comprehensive, Sara became suspicious about their real intentions. According to her, because she became increasingly invested in the various ‘anti-covid’ groups and absorbed their news and articles, she was able to ‘see through’. The following quote illustrates this process: Then in 1989 the postsocialist transition (převrat) happened and I thought – that’s it, I don’t have to care about politics anymore. I was enjoying my youth, my family …I wasn’t interested. Then we started hearing about all the corruption scandals, the huge privatisation thefts etc. but I thought that anyways I wouldn't be able to do anything about it. And now, as we entered the ‘covid era’, I thought that it was about time that I should really start getting interested in politics again. (08sara50a) Later Sara talked about fearing that the government would impose another strict lockdown, 'I only hope, that if something like that were to happen, that people would finally wake up and take to the streets and throw those bastards from their positions' (08sara50a). This became a noticeable pattern among our interlocutors who were actively participating in various online ‘anti-covid’ groups Krolova studied. The pandemic and their opposition to the government restrictions turned them from disengaged or allegiant citizens – not actively engaging with politics and ‘living their ordinary lives’ – into critical or assertive citizens (Dalton and Welzel 2014, Dalton 2004; Klingemann 1999; Norris 1999). With regards to their subsequent political (re)engagement, Kralova identified four core trends: 1. Defiant attitude towards the government in power (even by those who would previously support it) was almost unanimous. This is captured by the following quote from Karel (70a), who I mentioned earlier: 'Back then I became quite enchanted with Babiš, when he had appeared as one of the richest Czechs on TV and stated that all the politicians steal and that he was going to put an end to this. But now, looking at how he’s acting with regards to covid, I totally changed my mind about him' (05karel70a). 2. Change in voting preferences towards new, non-established political parties that advocate the abolition or limitation of covid-related restrictions (either SPD and Trikolora – both far right and populist parties). The following statement by Rudolf is one of many examples; 'And who will I vote for…someone for sure. Someone who can do something about this situation (covid restrictions). I don't really trust Okamura Deliverable D2.7 Page 100 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe (leader of SPD), but he has some good people there and I think they have the power to change something' (06rudolf30a). 3. Active engagement in new emerging political movements and parties with an aspiration to enter parliamentary politics. Pavlina (30b) is one of the research participants who openly shared with us their anti-covid positions: ‘Well because of my disagreement with the situation I joined a political party – Volný Blok. People can say whatever they want about them, but to me they seemed the best choice. And we organise trips to Prague to go to demonstrations, and thanks to this demonstrations I also started a local Volný Blok fb group, because on the way there, our bus was stopped by the cops and we couldn't continue and couldn't make it to the demo’ (at the time there was a national ban on interregional travel). (09pavlina30b) 4. Support of anti-systemic and protest ‘civil society’ movements calling for direct action, showing strong anti-party sentiments. Barbora works as a caregiver in an elderly care home in the Ostravský region. When asked why she supports the figure of Daniel Landa (a famous musician, an ex member of a far right skinhead band, who was during the pandemic calling for civil disobedience), she responded: 'I like him because he is apolitical. It doesn't matter if you vote for ČSSD (social democrats) or whoever else. He says he is apolitical. He has nothing to do with politics. And this I really like –he doesn’t divide the people', she concludes pessimistically by saying, 'But as always, when someone starts this kind of social movement, they end up in politics and everything goes wrong' (09barbora50a). This section provided an overview of some of the key underlying causes of the widespread phenomenon of political disillusionment, namely the enduring effects of many corruption scandals on the worsening public perceptions of formal political parties and representatives. Using the example of the anti-covid movement, it drew attention to the ways in which unaddressed political disillusionment, when combined with an ongoing socio-economic crisis, can encourage (re)politicisation of previously politically inactive citizens. While the anti-covid movement remains a marginal force in the society, its inner dynamics and style of political mobilisation provide valuable examples of how new anti-systemic political actors and movements establish themselves in times of crisis and monopolise political organising of the disillusionment widespread in the society. Deliverable D2.7 Page 101 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Figure 16: The deepest edges of the Czech interviews corpus relevant for the trust/distrust pillar ( ). The 𝑑≥8 codes for political and economic corruption, DDpolcor and Eeconcor are highly central. The visualisation in Figure 16 portrays DDpolcor (political corruption) and Eeconcor (economic corruption) as the central codes informing the topic of political and institutional trust/distrust. They emerged as key nodes from the network of other topically relevant codes such as mistrust protests and alienation. This is in line with the ethnographic insights, where corruption has been identified by the majority of the research participants as the main reason behind their political disillusionment. This widespread sentiment is in its many varieties captured by the DDeliteestrengment code, which is located at the right (East) edge of this visualisation view, connected to DDpolcor. It is worth noting that the code for protests resists a reduction of up to d 12, Eeconcor up to d 17, ≥ ≥ and DDpolcor up to d 36, which makes the last by far the most important of the set. Simultaneously, it has the ≥ broadest co-occurrence with the code for Andrej Babiš, meaning the highest number of respondents associated these two with each other. Certain inconsistencies between the choice of words as applied in the ethnographic analysis and the coding visualisations are due to the difference in methodological approaches in each. Deliverable D2.7 Page 102 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Figure 17: the edges supported by at least 2 informants ( ), including the following codes and their 𝑏 ≥ 2 neighbours: victims of post-socialist transformation (isolated, not shown), grassroots movements,protests,protest voting,civil disobedience. The visualisation (Figure 17) provides a general overview of the key codes which capture different aspects of political radicalization in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The networks around the two central codes – civil disobedience and protests enable us to see a range of conditions, perceptions, actions and outcomes, which have led the research participants to join ranks with those calling for anti-systemic action. The visualisation helps to reveal the deeply gendered aspect of those pandemic-related phenomena, which confirms the traditional division of gender roles in Czech society. Namely, it renders visible the fact that the women’s (orange lines) experience of the pandemic (and resistance to it) was centred around issues of increased domestic work, family care and barriers to the job market, while men (green) were able to invest more of their time to becoming politically involved and engaged in the ‘anti-Covid’ grassroots movement. Another interesting point emerging from the visualisation is the way in which the personification of politics can influence the electoral choices not only in the positive sense (voting for a candidate based on the sympathies), but also based on negative and polarised perceptions (anti-candidate voting). Deliverable D2.7 Page 103 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe 2.2.3. Subjectivity and affect as voting determinants 2.2.3.1. The role of affect and subjectivities in political choices The emotional choice of a political party is I think obvious. I do not know anyone who reads party electoral programmes in order to decide who to vote for. I’ve never read one and I think only under 1% of the voters actually read them. The voters of ANO are a completely apolitical group composed of protest votes from the left to the right. (05richard40b) This is how Richard, who lives in Prague where he owns several small businesses, responded to my question about the main factors behind people’s electoral choices. His response illustrates nicely one of the key observations emerging from Kralova’s fieldwork data, which itself mirrors what has been widely affirmed in anthropological and political-psychological literature: emotions are important. They embody everyday experiences and connect the individual to a wider collective, while shaping political choices, underpinning enhancing agency and directing action. In political psychology the recognition of the impact emotions have on political choices has become mainstreamed (Lau and Redlawsk 2001, Redlawsk and Mattes 2022) Anthropologists have contributed to extending our understanding of subjectivity, conceived in political psychology as relating to something predominantly individual, by pointing out to the central role of society and culture in shaping the experiences of personhood (Biehl 2007). This implies that the individuals’ deeply embodied sense of self, their sensibilities and sentiments are strongly shaped by wider societal norms, values and expectations. Furthermore, Sherry Ortner (2005) has accentuated the influence of the political on the formation of the individual and argued that subjectivity is in fact constituted by the emotional experience of the political subject, 'a subject caught up in a world of violence, state authority and pain, the subject’s distress under the authority of another' (Ortner in Luhrman 2006: 346). In the context of our ethnographic findings, these insights are significant because they show how the participants’ agency and involvement in their country’s politics is closely determined by their experience as political subjects and vice versa. To draw on specific examples, several research participants shared their feeling of being not represented by the existing political parties (as the previous section on political disillusionment illuminated) and not having their individual needs addressed or even acknowledged by the dominant political representation. 'What I do not get from this state is security, that 'What I do not get from this state is security, that if something bad happened, I would be supported' (06rudolf30a), or as expressed by Marie (50a), who is from one of the poorest regions in Czechia (Usti nad Labem) and is currently unemployed, 'I am very saddened by what is going on in this country. Deliverable D2.7 Page 104 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe The government gets on my nerves, they do not care about the people, but just about themselves. We need someone new who will care about the people' (05marie50a), can deeply affect one’s sense of the self and their role in the wider society, their level of trust towards public institutions and finally their political choices and actions. As Richard (40b) elaborated further, 'A lot of people shift to the extremist parties because they do not see any real support from the state…in this country we have over one million indebted people subjected to legal debt enforcement processes, who are having their Christmas bonuses taken away from them…of course they will vote for the extremists' (05richard40b). The formation of subjectivity in connection to politics is deeply internalized, and translates into a concrete political action through affect. In anthropological literature affect is recognized as the main driver of emotions, 'a felt bodily intensity, the feeling of having a feeling' (Massumi in Rutherford 2016: 18.2). It is essentially what animates the acting subject. In a similar vein as subjectivity, affect is social through and through, strongly shaped by its socio-cultural surroundings. It has been identified by various scholars (Ahmed 2004, Massumi 2015, White 2017, Mason 2018) as playing a key role in the sphere of politics, unsettling the liberal myth that politics represents a domain 'of reasoned democratic deliberation based on facts' (Bangstad 2019, Redlawsk and Mattes 2022). In the past decade, ‘the politics of affect’ has become closely associated with the rise of right-wing populism, as populist politicians globally have shown to be particularly skilled in mobilising their support around affective intensification (Rico, Guinjoan and Anduiza, 2017). Populist politics therefore not only challenges the liberal democracy’s principles and values, it also transgresses its traditional style of political deliberation by drawing on a wide range of affective sentiments including anger, fear, anxiety but also positive affects such as security, belonging and closeness. While the significance of emotions has been most visible within the realm of populist politics, it should be emphasised that affect has played a central role in all different kinds of political mobilisations, liberal and conservative, left and right. What follows is a discussion of the main ways in which affect and subjectivity shaped the political choices and actions of our participants. Discussion Personalities over party partisanship One of the striking aspects emerging from the ethnographic data was the importance that participants placed on Deliverable D2.7 Page 105 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe with the ultimate aim of destabilising the western liberal order. In the context of the Czech online spaces which I studied, the followers of these ‘conspiracies’ would then often be described by the ‘liberal-minded’ majority of the internet as ‘irrational’, ‘emotional’ and ‘dumb’ castaways who did not manage to climb up the social ladder, and this led them to believe in this nonsense. When I interviewed Tom (40b), a person who in his free time was running one of satire Facebook groups dedicated to making fun of the ‘anti-covid’ movement, his response to how he perceived their supporters was: Well we live with people who are so stupid that it seems that they would find it difficult not to bump into nonmoving objects…I essentially agree with the explanation that Kellner (one of the richest oligarchs in the Czech Republic, who passed away in 2021) once gave. These people are the victims of globalisation. You have people who were able to profit from it – accept it, work with it, learn new languages and skills – people capable of adapting. And then you have the others, who see themselves as victims, but they just refuse to adapt, they do not want to try new things, they do not want to change. (05tom40b) Tom’s response is fairly representative of the wider views shared among some members of the middle class who tend to be liberal in their outlook, which tend to blame individuals and families’ socio-economic difficulties on their personal responsibility or even, as alluded to by Tom, on some sort of inherent flaw in their character. Such perspectives which tend to omit structural basis of poverty can also be partially attributed to the previously mentioned anti-communist rhetoric, which excluded critiques of class divisions and social inequalities and stigmatised them as manifestation of the Communist past (Slačálek and Šitera 2022: 143). Some of these structural disadvantages surfaced strongly during the Covid-19 pandemic, taking the form of withering working conditions and loss of job security. While it would be inaccurate to state that all of the participants supporting the anti-covid movements were from working class or lower income backgrounds, I did identify a certain pattern among them. One large group of individuals I spoke to were primarily employed in the sectors dominated by precarious labour and as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic lost their jobs. For instance Anastazie (50a), a single woman in her late fifties, lost her job several times since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. She primarily worked in call centres doing telemarketing and because of the decrease in demand, she was made redundant. Throughout the pandemic she has struggled financially and is convinced that the virus has been created artificially in order to reduce the world’s population. She started following some of the anti-covid groups out of anger about the ongoing covid restrictions which were, according to her, designed to gradually ‘curtail our freedoms’ and also with hope that as a group, they could change something. Pavlina (30b) another of the participants who I mentioned earlier, joined the new political party Volný Blok centred around ‘anti-covid’ Deliverable D2.7 Page 112 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe rhetoric for similar reasons as Anastazie. Pavlina on the other hand, had to quit her job out of her own initiative because of the unexpected childcare responsibilities which arose as a result of the pandemic. As one of her sons has ADHD, the switch to online schooling forced her to spend more time at home with her children (Pavlina’s boss in the industrial bakery where she worked was unwilling to adjust her working hours). Another section of the participants supporting or voting for the emerging ‘anti-covid’ political parties consisted of workers, who had to continue to be physically present at their workplaces even during the periods of higher infection rates. For instance Ondřej (20b) who works in a factory in Prague told me: Yes I was going to work throughout covid. We did not stop the production. We were even lying –if we had covid, we were asked not to report it. We lied to the doctors and the tracking centres about (not) being in contact with someone positive. We got instructions from the management that if we did, we shouldn't report it. But it was us, the workers lying, so essentially if they found out, the blame would be on us. They put all of the responsibility on us, but it was the management that forced us to do it. And this was a common practice in many factories. (02ondrej20b) Ondřej also told me that there was almost no protective measures in place which made him anxious because he lives in the same household as his grandmother, 'When covid started, I was the only one who was pressuring our boss to introduce some PPE at work, because I live with my grandmother and I was worried that I might pass it to her. Also I wanted to say something, because everyone from the management switched to home office and us, on the factory floor had to keep coming –but I also wanted to stay home! So I told him – either you give me face masks –or I will stay at home. And the next day, he gave them to us' (02ondrej20b). I have heard similar stories from several other participants. In one instance, a worker employed in a large ironworks factory told me that they were asked to keep going to work even if they themselves tested positive. And even if these instructions did not come from above, many people decided not to follow the official guidelines and measures for practical reasons. Because to stay at home rather than to show up to work, with the sick pay amounting to only 60% of their declared salary (the declared salary in cases of precarious work tends to already be very low) would significantly reduce their family income, which many could not afford.27 Quite a few of the participants I spoke to were also essential workers, working in the medical and care sectors. Even here, I observed quite a lot of vaccine scepticism and some support for the anti-covid movement. For instance Barbora (50a), who was employed in a private retirement home told me that during the strongest waves 27 PAQ Research’ sociological survey, mapping the impacts of the covid-19 on the work life in the Czech Republic: https://zivotbehempandemie.cz/destabilizace-prace Deliverable D2.7 Page 113 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe of infection rates, almost all of the staff tested positive with Covid. As a result she was asked to cover shifts for her colleagues, working five days in a row, sometimes even 24 hour shifts. There was a lack of PPE and as the virus spread around the retirement home, Barbora also had to deal with many of the clients passing away; 'A lot of them were dying. I was walking across the ward with a saturator, torch, tonometr and thermometer, wrapped up in the ‘covid spacesuit’ (skafandr), praying that no one else dies. It was terrible' (09barbora50a). While Barbora made use of the extra financial bonuses that majority of the medical staff received during the pandemic, she said that this was never going to make up for the ‘trauma’ that she endured during those days. She also complained that the management never appreciated the sacrifices that the staff had to make and that they never received any formal appraisal. The pressure that Barbora experienced at her workplace strongly affected her personal life which culminated in a breakup with her long-term partner. Angered by all the ‘nonsensical’ restrictions, Barbora started following one of the civil movement anticovid initiatives, hoping in the power of the “united people in resistance”. What clearly emerges from the participants’ accounts is the role of anger in guiding their political support of the emerging ‘anti-covid’ movement. The importance of fear in mobilising this support can also not be stressed hard enough, as on a daily basis, new videos about the ‘new world order’ and the deadly effects of the covid vaccines would dominate facebook groups and group chats. However, we should not underestimate the importance of distrust, anxiety and even anger as key factors driving the political mobilisation of those anti-covid groups (and other similar populist-leaning movements).28 While the anxiety over worsening living conditions on one hand, and the growing support for such groups (or simply just covid scepticism) on the other, have not been explicitly connected or described by the participants, the few examples which were presented here illuminate the relevance of this connection. First is the lack of opportunity to opt out from coming to work (contrary to the majority of the middle and upper-middle class people able to work in home offices) and essentially exposing oneself and one’s family to the danger of contagion. Second, hearing from the government that closure of big industries (full lockdown) was unthinkable because of the negative impact this would have on the national economy (capital is more valuable than human live). Third, having one’s source of already precarious livelihoods actively threatened or stripped down due to the government-imposed restrictions – all of these factors have certainly contributed to an immense amount of psychological and material pressure. This could perhaps serve as another explanation for the participants’ 28 As Salmela and Sheve argue: ‘right-wing populism is characterized by repressed shame that transforms fear and insecurity into anger, resentment, and hatred against perceived “enemies” of the precarious self. Left-wing populism, in turn, associates more with acknowledged shame that allows individuals to self-identify as aggrieved and humiliated by neoliberal policies and their advocates’ (2018, 434). Deliverable D2.7 Page 114 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe complete rejection of the virus. Finally, being targeted by the discourse of individualized blame and responsibility, designed and circulated by primarily liberal politicians and the media for the past thirty odd years, has created an additional layer of (partially internalised) frustrations. All of these accumulated sentiments then become an easily exploited target by various populist parties and movements. However, populists around the world do not draw their support only from subjectivities and affects associated with fear, anger and hate. As was demonstrated by the narratives of the participants involved in the anti-covid movement, these new collectivities can also bring about an important sense of belonging, care and hope. To conclude with the words of Spruyt et al. (2016: 336) 'what distinguishes the support for populism from simple political discontent and frustrations is that populism remains a politics of hope, that is, the hope that where established parties and elites have failed, ordinary folks, common sense, and the politicians who give them a voice can find solutions.' The visualisation presented in Figure 18 shows the semantic space encapsulating the codes for anger and fear. Fear and anger are the central nodes in this view, revealing the importance of gender for the study of emotions: women are more likely to talk about fear while men more often invoke anger. All of these are strongly related to COVID experiences (CULman, SIincomp, lockdown, vaccinations, respirators masks). The “Fear” subgraph points to concerns related primarily to physical and mental health issues, while anger is connected to codes signalling institutional issues. “Anger” is directly related to “cultural manipulation,” while fear is more often invoked in the context of concern with immigration. Finally, cultural manipulation is connected with a cluster centred around thinking in terms of nation, concerns with the EU, and the invocation of history. Deliverable D2.7 Page 115 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Figure 18: the codes for fear,anger and nationalism and their neighbours. Edges are supported by at least 2 informants ( ). 𝑏≥ 2 2.2.4. Romanticization of history, declinism and (anti-)nostalgia 2.2.4.1. The role of history in fueling populist sentiments 'The past frames the present, imbuing it with distinctive meaning' (Burawoy and Verdery 1999: 11). Deliverable D2.7 Page 116 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Scholars across social sciences have written at great lengths about the ways in which historical production, rather than constituting some sort of objective process, becomes subjected to various political strategies of power and domination (Kubik and Bernhard 2014, Foucault 1980). Collective memory therefore emerges as an important component of various nationalist projects because it provides a core structure and meaning to the collective history and identity making processes. Instinctively, having control over the knowledge of the past has become crucially important for advancing various political agendas of (right-wing) populist actors, which tend to structure their discourses around nationalist and nativist categories (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017). These historical narratives however are not only instrumentalized and spread by the political and cultural elites. They are simultaneously reappropriated, sustained and circulated by the citizens. They turn into popular folk tales which we tell to ourselves about ourselves and constitute important cultural signposts according to which people interpret and navigate their everyday realities and events of a wider scale. In the digital ethnography of the Czech online spaces, we have identified three main ways in which historical discourses were evoked by participants when they expressed nationalist sentiments or frustrations with the current state of affairs. These are 1. The Nation in Opposition 2. Declinism 3. Postsocialist (Anti)-Nostalgia. 2.2.4.2. The Nation in Opposition 'On the other hand history has shown us that whenever they tried to subjugate our nation, we always persevered. Even if it lasted a century, two centuries or 40-50 years. We, the Czechs, have always managed to persevere and come out of it as winners. Sometimes they say that Hussites were the last warriors –I do not think so. We survived the Habsburgs and the Second World War, during which we were supposed to be exterminated as a nation. We survived communism and I think we will also be able to survive these Covid times.' (06rudolf30a) Rudolf (30a) is a founder and an active supporter of one of the anti-covid civil society groups, which primarily campaigned around the rights of children to attend school ‘without conditions’ during the pandemic.29 When he was talking to me about his frustrations with the government-imposed restrictions, he used national historical references to invoke hope in overcoming the current situation. Each of the periods referenced by Rudolf (the Hussite movement, the Habsburg monarchy, the Nazi Protectorate and the Soviet Communist rule) are some of the key historical moments which have shaped the construction of the Czech collective identity and political 29 During the first year of the pandemic, Czech Republic was one of the countries with the longest closure of educational institutions in Europe (started on March 11 and ended May 25, 2020). A lot of the ‘anti-covid’ movement organising originated around this issue. Deliverable D2.7 Page 117 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe culture. Slačálek (2021) identifies their common root in the ‘oppositional unity’ (originating with the opposition to the Habsburg Empire) and characterises Czech nationalism as based on the idea of a ‘nation in opposition’. The negative affective dimension of the collective memory of ‘the nation in opposition’, very much operating on the oppositional mechanism of ‘us versus them’, can result in real material implications. In the Czech context for instance, it has served as a partial legitimization for the violent expulsion of Sudeten German after 1945. The collective anxieties connected with Sudeten Germans remained one of the key agitation topics of the Czech culture wars of the first decade following the postsocialist transition. In the context of my fieldwork, the majority of these ‘nation in opposition’ narratives which invoked the heroic history of standing up to the oppression of the foreign occupying forces, occurred primarily in the supply side of the anti-covid movements’ discourses. They were instrumentalized by their various ‘leaders’ and ‘spokesmen’ with the objective of fueling nationalist sentiments and engendering a sense of unity, strength and a ‘will to act’ among their followers. They were mobilised during speeches at demonstrations or appeared in some of the posts shared on various ‘anti-covid’ facebook groups which I studied. Below is an extract from a speech by Jan Zítko, during a demonstration against the introduction of the Green Covid Passes (7.7.2021): 'Europe and Europeans always defended themselves from the pressure of the incoming settlers. We can remember when Turks tried to conquer Vienna…it was basically Czechs, Moravians and Selesians who put an end to it and saved Vienna from starvation. And there are plenty of moments like this in history. We just have to remember them. Because if our ancestors saw this, they would have to turn in their graves!' However, whenever during our conversations participants organically started talking about what they believed were some common traits of the Czech character and identity, their accounts were more in line with what Ladislav Holý (1996) coined the ‘nationalism of little men’. One of the aspects that Holý described in his elaboration on the Czech national identity and nationalism is that 'Czechs do not have ideas of national greatness – it is connected much more with self-defence or with small apolitical values' (Holý in Slačálek 2021: 174). And this sentiment surfaced across the dataset. Zuzana (40a) a highschool teacher from a Moravian region, explaining why Czechs are not very good at following the covid-19 restrictions, 'But what if you pass it (covid) to someone and the person dies…we are not used to being honest or playing fair. We are used to circumvent the rules [...] We are generally very inward-looking. Germans for example, they feel a way greater responsibility towards Europe. They are completely on a different level when it comes to developing their country and democracy' (03zuzana40a). Blanka (50a) a hospital nurse Deliverable D2.7 Page 118 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe living in the South Bohemian region, echoed Zuzana’s view, when stating that ‘Yes we are a nation of Švejks30 What kind of frauds are the Czechs capable of coming up with! For instance we were told –you have to vaccinate, you will have certificates with QR code as a proof. And at the very same moment the Czechs start producing fake QR codes and falsify the certificates' (11blanka50a). When I spoke to Ludvik (20b), a firefighter from the same region as Zuzana, about the current pandemic restrictions, he complained that Czechs are not capable of any real protest: 'This is our nature…we are simply velvet (referring to the 1989 Velvet Revolution which was described as a ‘peaceful transfer of power’), too soft. We are the banana republic in the centre of Europe and all we can do is to complain. This we do well…we go to the pub, sit down and complain. But when the time comes to do something real and brave, we shut up and go to hide' (06ludvik20b). These accounts speak of the ‘smallness’ of the Czech people who are faced with the shared fate of ‘grand’ national history, narrated through the trope of ‘us against the world’. Some key historical events (and their national hegemonic interpretation) have further reinforced this mythology, such as the Battle of White Mountain (1620), the Munich Agreement (1938) and the failed Prague Spring culminating with the Warsaw Pact military intervention (1968). These have bolstered the theme of ‘about us without us’ (‘o nás bez nás’) associated with the collective memory of treason, abandonment and ‘foreign domination’ which continues to shape the Czech national identity and its relations with the wider world. 2.2.4.3. Declinism According to various surveys and public opinion polls, the Czech Republic is one of the most eurosceptic countries of all the EU member states. For example, in the Summer 2022 Eurobarometer, 29% of Czechs admitted to having a negative image of the EU, which was (after Greece) the second highest, whereas the 39% held a positive view, 30 ‘It is hard not to think about an important strand of the Czech culture, expressed in the self-ironic tenor of Hrabal’s novels, early Forman films, or—most important—that quintessential Czech character, Hašek’s good soldier Švejk. The main message of this version of Czechness is that mockery, satire, and auto-irony are handy political weapons. It is employed by actors who are comfortable invoking the irreverent pole of the Czech national culture, one of several potentially usable reservoirs of enactable scripts of action (or specific points of concern). In this “Švejkian” vision of national identity “the strength of the nation is not in its moral victories..., but in its ability to survive three hundred years of Habsburg oppression, six years of German occupation, and forty-three years of communism through pretended loyalty and tacit or explicit collaboration” (Holy 1996: 130). In 2009, the students commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the fall of communism did not invoke the “heroic” version of Czech history (see Holy 1996), but its Švejkian rendition, albeit combined with a public stance inspired by the Havelian spirit of “anti-politics’ (Bernhard and Kubik 2014: 286). Deliverable D2.7 Page 119 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe the third lowest in this study31 (Eurobarometer 2022: 122). The level of euroscepticism found during Kralova’s digital fieldwork was equally startling. While it is true that the majority of the participants with whom she spoke held right-wing and conservative views (among which the EU criticism was to be expected), the level of doubt about the correct functioning of the institution was high even among liberal minded individuals. The reasons for this are numerous and in this section we will examine the ways in which my participants’ romanticization of the national past has impacted their views of the European Union as the main driver behind the perceived decline of the Czech Republic (and Europe more broadly). The notion of declinism as an 'ideology resting on decline of the West as a whole' (Slačálek 2021: 173) was most commonly referenced by the participants on two co-occurring levels – the economic and the moral. In the context of the former, accounts of Czechoslovakia’s ‘golden industrial age’ were commonly invoked, emphasising the nation’s international prestige in a given industry, national self-sufficiency and overall prosperity. These were brought up in order to contrast the current semi-peripheral position of the Czech Republic within the EU and the wider globalised neoliberal economy. The following ethnographic examples illuminate this sentiment; 'We used to be self-sufficient, in terms of food production…everything. We used to build steam boats, weapons – at weapons production we used to be at the top. And when I look at it today, what they import here…We also used to be debtless – medical care for free, school for free…everything for free. I would never think that I would be glorifying the communist time – I used to be so opposed to the regime.' (05karel70a) 'First things first, we need to renew our domestic production. Throw away rape (used for rapeseed oil) from our fields and start planting potatoes, carrots, coll, garlic…Revitalise our industry. There used to be times when our steel plants were the second most renowned internationally. We used to have our sugar factories, renowned glass and porcelain factories, and the automobile industry. The ratio of export to import was much higher.' (07dagmar30a) 'We used to have our own mark of trucks (Tatra), arms manufacturing, glassworks Jablonec, textile factory Liberec…today, we have nothing. We are a transfer station of Europe. I know that we are in the heart of Europe, but in the 1990s we had zero international debt…we used to own everything and today we own nothing.' (11blanka50a) 31 For comparison, the EU average was 47% (positive image of the EU) and 16% (negative image). Expressed positive image of the EU among Poles was 63% and Germans 50%, with 4%, respectively 13% having a negative image. Deliverable D2.7 Page 120 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe According to Groman and Stehlík (2021), the myth of ‘the industrial greatness’ has its roots in the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938), where industrial production flourished. This myth was further strengthened during the socialist era (1948-1949), where industrial production and productivity constituted the key elements of state propaganda. Building on the available statistics, Groman and Stehlík note that the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic’s claims to being the ‘world’s top industrial producer’ were largely fictional, because at times when the national production was reaching its peak, it only managed to equal to the international average. Nevertheless, it should be noted that Czechoslovakia stood out as one of the most industrialised and urbanised areas in the region (Janos 2000). Regardless, this imagined past constituted an important reference point of several of my participants who used it to channel their frustrations with the perceived economic decline which they associated with the Czech membership in the European Union. A very common point articulated by the research participants across political spectrum was the perceived unequal position of the EU member states, particularly the CEE countries, within the overall structure of the EU. Their criticism focused on worsening labour conditions, wage inequality and a perceived loss of national sovereignty. This point is expanded by Miroslav (30a) in the following quote: I was never a big fan of the EU. I think it is a bit of a colonial project and we represent the cheap labour force. The aim is not for us to align with the standards of Germany. No one wants that, it wouldn’t be profitable for them. That is why Orban is such an ideal ally of the EU, because he keeps Hungary in shits. So my opinion of the current functioning of the EU is negative, but it's difficult to suggest any alternative. Currently the EU opposition is based on some nationalist views, which is not a path which I would agree with. Any other reform looks difficult. (07miroslav30a) Rostislav (50a), an entrepreneur from the Ostravský region, who contrary to Miroslav has right-wing conservative political leanings, also put forward a similar critique towards the EU. What do you think was the reason for the expansion of the EU member states…to expand the financial markets. So they took the semi dead, drained country after the Warsaw Pact, which did not yet manage to recover, in the same way as the other Eastern European countries did not recover. And they flooded us with products, investment, foreign capital…so the people are frustrated that they work for Koreans, for Germans. [...] We basically lost our sovereignty. (07rostislav50a) Deliverable D2.7 Page 121 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe perceived unsuccessful postcommunist transformation (codes: postsocialist transformation, catching up) is supposedly linked to the Czech accession to the EU. 3.2.5. Network analysis and visualisations summary Visualisations support the ethnographic insights There is a quite remarkable disdain for the EU. It is seen as an unwelcome oppressive transnational structure, promoting `globalism`, not unlike the Soviet Union in the past. Simultaneously it represents (and is a promoter of) the value and societal decadence of the postmodern era we live in now. To a certain degree, it is an overarching theme justifying or supercharging nationalist pushback from both the non-radicalized (pro-Babiš) and radicalised (pro-Fringe) populist supporters. The aforementioned split of pro-populist sphere is clearly seen by both visions. Babišand to a large extent also Okamura/SPD (which co-exists as a actor-dyad, unlike the Babišcase) are perceived as already corrupt, consumed by their own mainstreamization. Visualisations nuance the ethnographic insights There are several key phenomena that are presented in a more refined light through the visualisations. First of all the gendered nature of the COVID-crises related issues, primarily work precarisation, along with mental and physical wellbeing, but also different avenues of political radicalization. In general, the graph vision informs us about the push for reaffirmation of traditional gender norms. Whereas male participants are clearly claiming their own political agency, women are facing deeply running marginalisation, regression of their agency into familial care and service and as the ethnographic vision demonstrates, openly and directly leaving the political agency to men. Interestingly, Lubomír Volný, a prominent figure in the fringe populist scene, shows a “champion” among the female population of our sample. The second avenue where the graph view differs from the ethnographic one is the matter of clustering, especially the affective aspects of the discourses under umbrella nodes. In this way, the codes for economic and political corruption and elite estrangement contain expressions of distrust or mistrust, lack of legitimacy of the political elite. Though it seemingly reduces the importance of affective elements for the understanding of pro-populist tendencies, and thus presents a contradiction between the graph and ethnographic visions, it is rather a way in which the two complement each other in attest to the methodological parallelism within the project. Deliverable D2.7 Page 128 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Visualisations complement the ethnographic insights One specific aspect of the general Czech discourse on populism, coming both from those supporting and opposing it, is the way in which historical references are emerging from the interviews. This aspect is completely taken over by the all-consuming concepts or myths related to the Communist era, as in the ethnographic perspective, the graph view only reinforces the claim that the experience of Czechoslovak socialism and post-socialism are the key history-related nodes. Interestingly enough, as a reference point, they serve both as a positive and negative analogy, sometimes simultaneously even in one single interview. However no other expected major historical episodes, eras, events or personalities complement the overall picture in a similar manner, such as as the interwar democratic republic or the Nazi occupation and World War II do not seem to exist in the consciousness or cultural knowledge of the respondents. For further investigation One major issue posing a question for further research, is to what extent do affective elements play a role in the context of proor anit-populist tendencies. A more detailed focus on them in terms of the data might help introduce them as a more substantial category in the graph visualisations and thus allow for a more robust comparison with the ethnographic findings.. 2.3. GERMAN CASE 2.3.1. The Pandemic Context 2.3.1.1. General trajectory and government response It is not easy to provide a concise and coherent overview of all anti-pandemic measures in Germany. One of the central cleavages between the central government and the Länder was how to adequately respond to the Coronavirus. Should there be a central, unified approach or tailor-made, regional regulations aimed at curbing the spread of the virus? And like in all other countries, communication with the public during a constantly evolving and highly complex situation affecting almost all areas of life proved to be extremely difficult. Constitutionally, health policy in Germany is “Ländersache” (responsibility of federal states). Chancellor Merkel and her health minister Jens Spahn had to come to agreement with 16 different state governors. This time-consuming “horse trading” created notable frustration and dents in the public’s perception regarding policy Deliverable D2.7 Page 129 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe makers' ability to tackle the pandemic, a pandemic that did not care about Länder borders. While various laws and regulations were passed on the central government level, they were often tied to fluctuating case numbers, rates of hospitalisation, and availability of intensive care hospital beds on the regional level. These indicators differed from state to state, which led to a lot of confusion, most notably during cross-border travel. In general one can state that while there were overarching principles such as social distancing, mask mandates, closing of shops, no two states had the exact same lockdown measures in place and the ability to enforce those measures also varied substantially. Figure 20: An example of diverging Corona regulations between central government and states. Source: https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/themen/coronavirus/regelungen-ab-2-november-1806818 There were two main “hard lockdowns” in Germany (22 March – 4 May 2020, 16 December 2020 – 10 January 2021). But throughout the pandemic the government adapted measures according to shifting infection rates. From August 2021 onwards Germany implemented what is referred to as the "3G Regel” (geimpft, getestet, genesen). This regulation requires people who enter public and private buildings to be either vaccinated, have recently recovered from Covid-19, or tested negative for the virus within 24 hours. Deliverable D2.7 Page 130 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe 2.3.1.2. Cultural Climate around Covid: Conspiracy myths’ driven populism Since the research focus of the project for Germany revolves around the “Neue Bundesländer” – the former GDR states (including almost all of the semi-structured interviews) this brief overview mostly highlights developments, movements, narratives in those regions, especially in Saxony While Germany was lauded internationally for curbing the spread of the Coronavirus initially, wide-spread resistance to lockdown measures and public health advice, anti-elite agitation against scientists and policy makers increasingly intensified. This was especially true in the eastern Bundesländer, where the AfD managed to sow populist discontent against the central government reminiscent of PEGIDA in 2014, thus using the pandemic to bolster its profile. Heterogeneous groups composed of ‘anti-vaxxers,’ far-right groups, new age spiritualists, and conspiracy theorists gathered to protest against state authority and elites. The fervour of their opposition manifested itself most notably in the attempt to storm the German Bundestag in August 2020, but also in various gatherings and protest marches (often 10,000-50,000) that violated lockdown measures. Many identify as freedom fighters defending their constitutional rights, and in extreme cases view themselves as victims of a freedom-eroding, autocratic state – a state they compare to the Third Reich. This self-victimization and the accusation that fascist tyranny is being imposed on them ironically often go hand-in-hand with the propagation of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic Coronavirus conspiracy theories (QAnon, Reichsbürger, Querdenken, SHAEF etc.). In Saxony, the AfD managed to successfully frame the Merkel government’s anti-COVID measures as unlawful and tyrannical, evoking memories of and drawing parallels with the pre-unification era and the socialist regime. By framing lockdowns, mask mandates, and later vaccine regulations as externally imposed measures the far-right party instrumentalized and deepened socio-political grievances in the East. It is remarkable that the AfD in the eastern Bundesländer managed to flip a 70-year-old script on vaccinations by framing vaccinations as an illiberal and freedom-robbing tool imposed by a power-hungry central government. Historically, vaccinations were compulsory and highly organised in East Germany, whereas they were often voluntary in West Germany. Furthermore, anti-vaccine beliefs were more prominent in the West (Staiano-Daniels 2022). This has now changed, as there is positive correlation between voting for AfD and being unvaccinated, and regions that have the most unvaccinated citizens are AfD strongholds (Hecking and Maxwill 2021). Deliverable D2.7 Page 131 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe In late February 2021, a new political movement and party emerged in Saxony. The “Freie Sachsen” (Free Saxonians) have organised dozens of protest marches and have the largest Saxony focused Telegram group (approx. 150,000 members). The leadership consists of former Neo-Nazis and other far-right agitators. The goal of the Freie Sachsen, according to its website, is to end Berlin’s stranglehold on Saxonian socio-historical identity, including anti-lockdown measures and other Corona-related activities. Saxony’s CDU Minister Michael Kretschmer is depicted as an illegitimate, West German leader, defending Berlin’s and not Saxony’s interests (see image below) Figure 21: Image posted by Twitter account of Freie Sachsen on 06 November 2021. Translation: When will the tyrant fall? Kretschmer's mercenaries driven by bloodlust. Source: https://twitter.com/freiesachsen_/status/1457104389903106052 The German government has responded by nudging Facebook to delete several conspiracy groups on Facebook. This has hampered the ability to reach out to potential respondents online, because a) some of the observed spaces don’t exist anymore, b) there is an additional layer of mistrust and c) because most populist social media groups have pivoted to Telegram. General themes that became evident in conducted interviews were feelings of being abandoned and/or not represented by policy makers, financial insecurity, detrimental impact of social isolation, general confusion of lockdown measures, and distrust of scientists and the media. Deliverable D2.7 Page 132 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe 2.3.2. The politics of affect The discussion of the government’s anti-COVID measures aroused a range of negative emotions among respondents. Some, like GER01Kevin50b, verbalised their anger towards state institutions (‘I was really angry also about what the Federal Constitutional Court did.’) but, even when they did not, one could nevertheless infer ‘a strong, uncomfortable emotional response’ to the actions of the government that were considered ‘incongruent with [their] values, beliefs, or rights’ (Thomas 2001, 42). Other emotions one could infer were frustration (annoyance at being unable to perform specific tasks or achieve specific goals as a result of the lockdown), anxiety (feelings of unease about the vaccination) and stress (physical or psychological manifestation of anxiety). Previous research confirms that understanding the affective power of anger and anxiety is key to understanding how populists acquire and maintain political power. As Nguyen argues (and as has been confirmed by other POPREBEL researchers), ‘Voters’ anger at elites and outsiders for their real, or imagined, loss of social and economic security is a powerful kindling for the resentment-fueled, anti-elite politics of populist parties. Moreover, the appeal of populism lies at least in part in its ability to validate voters’ anxiety that they are economically and socially left behind by distant elites and an increasingly heterogeneous lifeworld’ (2019, 2, emphasis added). The perception of specific groups as elites was inferred from the interviews and was understood, first and foremost, to refer to the German government – either as a single actor or individual politicians – and other mainstream MPs. While not all legal and medical experts (by virtue of their specialist knowledge and skills) would necessarily be understood as members of the elite, they would be included if they were called in to provide policy advice to the government. Some respondents expressed distrust towards these medical advisors; this was primarily due to the fact the government was perceived to have decided not to draw on a range of expertise but relied too much on the views of just a handful of experts, ignoring medical opinions that went against the government’s (perceived) interests. Capitalists were also mentioned as an elite group, albeit not as frequently. Negative sentiment was attached to the government/capitalists/medical advisors and positive sentiment to ‘us’, reflecting the moral hierarchy between the ‘corrupt elites’ and ‘pure people’ common to most populist discourses. Other out-groups (such as social liberals) could also be inferred from interviews but they were not necessarily positioned in a hierarchical relationship to the respondents. The construction of borders between the in-group and out-group allows populists and their supporters to delimit the definition of the ‘pure people’ in whose name they claim to speak, as this allows them to delegitimise any voices that oppose or challenge their views. As Osuna argues, ‘borders are used in a multiplicity of populist discursive articulatory practices and play an important role in underpinning several of the dimensions of the populist construct’, whereby defining the in-group and out-group Deliverable D2.7 Page 133 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe along multiple axes allows populists to construct ‘an idealised society based on emotional and ahistorical interpretations of the past that the populist projects aspire to revive’ (Osuna 2022: 6). The significance of the past was a theme that emerged clearly from the interviews with some respondents (see below). There was general support for the lockdown at the start of the pandemic but over time the various policies (particularly testing requirements, the mask mandates and vaccinations) and their effects were criticised and the motivations for the policies questioned. Anger was directed at the centralisation of control in the hands of a small group of political, legal and medical experts; the lack of critical voices among mainstream politicians and the impact on democracy; at the perceived illogicality of the measures; and the negative construction of the unvaccinated and resultant social polarisation. As a consequence, the motivations behind the government’s anti-COVID measures were questioned and alternative explanations were presented, the belief in which fuelled further waves of anger. Finally, the respondents discussed how they responded to (their perception of) the government anti-COVID measures. Hans, a man in his early 40s from the former GDR, understood the need for expertise but questioned what he saw as the overcentralisation of decision-making: ‘At the beginning you think, yes, okay, an expert will be brought in. Okay, but then only one expert is brought in. But a pandemic like this has different aspects. So it's like when I set up a project, I don't just need a project planner who's good at planning material value flows ((RM: check translation)). I need a recruiter as well. I need the people working on the machinery. I need another process expert. I might need someone from development. So I need diversity. And you didn't feel it at all [with the COVID response]. They just focused on that one, that one strand over there. I think it was also a huge mistake that there weren't just different people ... In the event of a pandemic like this, I would form a committee and just get all the experts that are there together and let them decide or also give a recommendation and concentrate everything in the hands of such a small group of people.’ While Hans accepted that the government was elected to make decisions on behalf of the people, he found the idea of unelected committees granting themselves the authority to pass resolutions undemocratic. It was not only the government that stoked the respondents’ anger but also other mainstream politicians who failed to challenge the government’s COVID policy; it was noted that the only critical voices were coming from the far-left and far-right. As Hans went on to say: ‘What I did notice, however, is that there were no critical voices anywhere and the only ones who said something were Die Linke [a socialist party] or the AfD [Alternative for Deliverable D2.7 Page 134 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe Germany, a far-right populist party]. …And for example Ms Wagenknecht of Die Linke, yes – she is not my favourite now – but at least she speaks plainly.’ Hopes that the Federal Constitutional Court would intervene and declare the government’s anti-COVID measures [regarding school closures] unconstitutional were dashed on 19 November 2021, when the Court rejected several complaints challenging school closures and a remote schooling requirement. Thinking back to that day, Kevin, a man in his late 50s living in eastern Germany, recalled ‘I was really upset ... I was really angry about what the Federal Constitutional Court did.’ Sabine, a woman living in South-West Germany, was also troubled by the fact that the government and Constitutional Court appeared to be speaking with one voice and criticised both institutions for ‘attacking the Basic Law [the Grundgesetz, the German constitution] by restricting our freedom. As some say so nicely now: Welcome to the GDR.’ While her reference to present-day Germany turning into the former communist state was intended as an insult, we will see later that other respondents who had grown up in the GDR bemoaned the fact that present-day German society had moved too far away from the values of the society of the former German Democratic Republic. While Beate, a woman in her early 50s from the former GDR, did not necessarily oppose all anti-COVID measures, she was frustrated by what she saw as a lack of logic guiding the government’s actions: ‘I would say, in the hospital, operations are performed with surgical masks and we should go shopping with FFP2 masks. That makes no sense to me. And, above all, what I find makes even less sense is that all these measures, if they are required, will only apply in three weeks’ time. Yes, why? If something is really bad …then it has to be now and not in three weeks or so. In my opinion, that's very strange.’ The respondents not only objected to the way the policies were decided and implemented but, in particular, were angry at the impact of these measures on the economy and society. Kevin saw the testing requirement as a ‘financial challenge for many employers because there are of course companies that are perhaps not so well positioned’. This would suggest that his concern was for smaller firms rather than international corporations, which would be better placed to absorb the costs. However, his anger was directed even more so at the way the government has constructed unvaccinated people as selfish, resulting in a society that has become increasingly polarised into the vaccinated and unvaccinated, which in turn has turned former friends against each other: The tone on the street is so raw, the people are so hostile to one another, people who used to be friends, who used to sit together at the table, now no longer say a word to each other. Just because they are vaccinated or unvaccinated. It’s ridiculous! (Kevin) Deliverable D2.7 Page 135 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe He was particularly concerned that this polarisation had also entered the private sphere of the home: ‘…our entire private life, except for that little bit at home, is suppressed. And the little bit at home you also destroy by inciting people within the family against each other: vaccinated and unvaccinated …Through all these measures that interfere with family life, tried to destroy the smallest common unit, namely the family.’ To understand Kevin’s anger we also need to remember that he grew up in the GDR, a communist state which sought to exercise maximum control over the population. As Paul Betts explains, as a result, 'social cohesion became polarised. It may have eroded in the wider “public” sense, but it was reinforced in smaller, more private networks. The Stasi's concerted efforts to break down the family through surveillance and denunciation actually tended to strengthen—not undermine—family solidarity. […] Despite the Stasi's best efforts, there was a low rate of success in getting children to spy on their own family members. In this way, the family still functioned as a kind of protective refuge for most people.' (2010, p. 49) We can therefore understand why his perception that the government is encroaching into the private sphere of the home and turning family members against one another became a source of anger. The effect on individual respondents of what was seen as the overly centralised, undemocratic behaviour on the part of the government and of the effect of the various anti-COVID measures on the economy and society was mixed. What did unite them was a suspicion of the motivations behind the government’s various policies. When asked whether she thought the government was acting in the best interests of the German people, Beate responded: ‘So I think rather differently: money. Money and power. And something, I have no idea what's going on in the background. But you get the feeling that it doesn't have very much to do with health.’ The financial interests of government ministers was brought up by a number of respondents, such as Lisa: ‘The decisions were made for purely political reasons. It's not about health, it's about money and power.’ The politicisation of the anti-COVID measures was felt to be related to the overall aim of exercising control over the population, whereby the government’s attempt to generate an atmosphere of fear was seen as a tool used by governments over the world to ensure quiescence: So 2001: terror. Then from time to time we kept trying to get in touch with some, I'll say yes, we died of something every year. Then came swine fever, then came mad cow disease, then came bird flu and we already had everything. It’s like Groundhog Day. I keep saying: We have died a hundred times and are still alive. So they tried to scare us again and again. (Kevin) Deliverable D2.7 Page 136 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe In this connection, he argued that the testing requirement was a means to ‘keep the numbers [of infections] high’ and thereby justify putting further extraordinary political measures in place. Politically, the anger generated by the government’s anti-COVID measures resulted in some respondents losing trust in elected politicians [‘all my understanding and trust kind of went totally down the drain’ (Beate)] or turning away from democratic politics [‘I don’t vote anymore’ (Kevin)]. Both Beate and Kevin thus supported moving away from representative politics and returning to the protest politics of 1989. Beate sees parallels between 1989 and today in that the ‘people wake up very, very slowly and finally get up. That was then too. It took a while but it came and it will come now I guess ... At least I hope so.’ Similarly, Kevin advocates the people taking back control and restoring balance between the government and the people, a balance which no longer exists: I always say we need a critical mass, we need a million on the streets, and all coming together in one place, something like in Leipzig in 1989 [the demonstrations that brought down the communist government]. And then we'll see. Because then you bring back the balance of power. Because one thing is a fact. One must always remember, what is the state? We are the state. The state is not the politicians who are politicians, they are actually our social representatives, but they are not currently representing us, they are currently crushing us, and that is the difference. (Kevin) Deliverable D2.7 Page 137 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe The following visualisation (Figure 24) shows the polarisation (code ‘polarisation’) around vaccination which involves codes: ‘vaccinated’, ‘unvaccinated’ and also ‘anti-vaxxers’. Figure 24: The codes for vaccinated,unvaccinated and anti-vaxxers and their deepest associations ( )) 𝑑≥6 *CULman: Mentions of manipulation, disinformation, indoctrination and propaganda in communicating *SIbureaucratization: State/Administration Incapacity (SI): Bureaucratization | (e.g. bureaucracy and red tape) *SIincompetence: government inefficiency and/or incompetence, state institutions not working as they should In general, the visualisation supports the ethnographic insight that German society was polarised along the lines of vaccination status, i.e. between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. However, it provides greater nuance in highlighting that men were more likely than women to frame discourses about vaccination status as polaris-ing, with debates about compulsory vaccinations particularly contentious. [NB: It is unclear from the visualisa-tion Deliverable D2.7 Page 144 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe whether respondents blame the unvaccinated for the ongoing pandemic or are they criticising those who blame the unvaccinated for the ongoing pandemic. This needs to be analysed in conjunction with the ethno-graphic data.] For women, there were two (potentially clashing) debates: (i) one which centred on the gov-ernment’s ineffectual and overly bureaucratic response to the vaccine roll-out and the insufficient supply of vaccines and (ii) the other which criticises what they see as discrimination against those who choose not to be vaccinated, which is associated with the government’s attempt to foment fear of not being vaccinated. The latter discourse frames this debate as one of injustice and civil rights. While the first debate is in line with what we see in the Affect visualisation, i.e. women wanting the lockdown to end and being frustrated by the government’s ineffectual vaccine rollout, the latter debate contradicts the inference that women were angry towards the unvaccinated for potentially prolonging the pandemic and thus the lockdown. For both men and women, the visualisation also identifies that the discourse fuelling polarisation was to some extent based on misinformation or the manipulation of data. The visualisation further supports the difficulty (highlighted in the ethnographic data) of disentangling the respondents’ opposition to the vaccine and their anger at the govern-ment in that the anti-vax sentiment had as much to do with the political implementation of the vaccination programme than with distrust in the vaccines themselves. 2.3.4. Retraditionalisation of gender roles While COVID was only recognised as a global pandemic in 2019, there has already emerged a sizeable literature on its gendered dimensions, with researchers examining the differential impact of the virus on men and women from both epidemiological and societal perspectives (Alon et al. 2020; Cain Miller 2020; Collins et. al 2020; Czymara et al. 2021; Wenham et al. 2020). The aim of this report is to provide a bottom-up analysis of the gendered impact of the German government’s anti-COVID measures – especially, the lockdown – and is driven, in particular, by the question of whether the respondents felt that the lockdown led to a retraditionalisation of gender roles, whereby men would revert to being the primary breadwinners and women would assume responsibility for looking after the children, or simply exposed patriarchal gender relations that had always existed.34 The main gendered impact of the lockdown cited by our respondents related to childcare. From March 2020 onwards the German federal government and the 16 Länder, which run local education policy, agreed to the 34 Unlike neo-traditionalism, which is understood in the POPREBEL project (see D1.1) to be a top-down socio-political strategy aimed at returning to what is claimed to be original, authentic ‘traditions’ after a period of disruption, retraditionalisation is used here to refer to a micro-level process whereby individuals or collectivities consciously or subconsciously revert to the traditional roles into which they or earlier generations had previously been socialised. Deliverable D2.7 Page 145 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe closure of schools and kindergartens during each of the three coronavirus waves. (By contrast, the government sought to keep factories open in a bid to protect the economy.) As a result, many women saw a shift in the role they played in the family, with men continuing to work as normal, while women were expected to assume responsibility for looking after the children – either by combining their full-time work and childcare responsibilities or by cutting back their working hours to make time for childcare. In the interviews, we see multiple examples of retraditionalisation of gender roles. While GER04Sonja00 does not have children herself, she observed this ‘old behaviour’ among her friends and family: ‘What I notice [is] that the man goes to work and the woman says ‘I'm just giving up my job temporarily’ or ‘I’ll just do it on the side.’ Working somehow and looking after the children at the same time, which everyone knows isn't possible […] one is really taken back to the old days.’ Even when couples agreed to share childcare responsibilities, the intention did not always match the reality. While GER04Frederike00’s husband did offer to work from home to help look after their autistic son when the lockdown was introduced, she found that he did not pull his weight and that she ended up doing most of the childcare in addition to working remotely. Nor could she count on the support of her parents (because of the social distancing requirements) or of the foreign au pair they had hired (due to the closure of Germany’s borders). As a result, she felt she had been ‘transported back to the forties or fifties. Cooking, shopping, children. And my job is a hobby.’ Very few of the male respondents mentioned childcare or other household duties when discussing the impact of the lockdown on their day-to-day lives. As the report on ‘Anger at elites’ showed, men were more likely to express concern about infringements on their personal liberty. GER04Andrea00 noted that, within her circle of acquaintances, the main negative impact of the lockdown for men was ‘that they can no longer go out for a beer in the evening and meet up with their buddies’. Some men, according GER02Simone20b, even saw the lockdown as an opportunity: ‘I work in academia and with the start of the lockdown there was this positive wave, especially among male academics, who said: 'Oh, finally I can finish my books, finally I can finish all my articles.' And I think there are now even studies that show that many male academics have published a lot more in 2020 or at least can spend a lot more time on it, while that was not the case at all for women in academia. So, it seems that way to give this relapse into certain traditional gender roles, at least in some parts of the population.’ With their reference to ‘old behaviour’, being ‘transported back to the forties or fifties’ or a ‘relapse into certain traditional gender roles’, the gendered impact of the lockdown can be understood as a form of gender retraditionalization for women such as GER04Frederike00, GER04Sonja00 and GER02Simone20b. For other respondents, the lockdown did not usher in a return to traditional gender norms but rather exposed the Deliverable D2.7 Page 146 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe patriarchal values that had always underpinned family politics in Germany. GER02Daniel20b noted how quickly ‘old role models and ways of thinking almost instinctively came to the fore’ during the crisis. ‘You describe it as “retraditionalization”,’ he continued, ‘but I wonder whether we perhaps only managed to change ‘traditional role models’ superficially. GER02Simone20b agreed, arguing that ‘the patriarchal ideal of the nuclear family of father, mother, child still strongly shapes family politics’. This is reflected in academic research which shows that, despite having made great progress in various indicators of gender equality, German women – even before the pandemic – were still considerably more likely than men to be responsible for looking after children, with over two-thirds of working mothers taking part-time jobs to square their employment with their childcare duties compared with just 1.9% of working fathers.35 Women complained that employers failed to make adjustments to working culture to take account of women’s dual burden as workers and mothers. As GER02Emma30b complained: In Spain and England, for example, it is normal for mothers to go back to work after three months – and there is also the appropriate support, such as day-care centres, which then take in the children from the age of just a few months. Germany is still very traditional here. When she did go back to work at a lower FTE after her maternity leave, her employers showed no understanding for her new situation, still expecting her to work the same number of hours a week, just in fewer days. Similarly, she noted that it would have been ‘unimaginable’ for her husband to reduce his work hours from 40 to 35 a week to look after their daughter for one afternoon. While some women were forced to juggle their work and childcare responsibilities, for others they had to give up work entirely, becoming completely financially dependent on their husbands. GER08Lisa40b shared her experience: Due to the school closure, the care of my younger child was no longer guaranteed and I was no longer able to work. I was a self-employed solo entrepreneur. With the loss of work, we are missing a complete second salary and my husband, as an employed roofer, is solely responsible for supporting the family. […] There was no help from the state for me. A further gendered impact of the lockdown related to the psychological harm on women. As women were more likely to stay at home, while men often continued to go to work, the former were more likely to suffer from 35 ‘German women face large equality gap in child care: study’, Deutsche Welle, 23.02.2022. Available at: https://www.dw.com/en/german-women-face-large-equality-gap-in-child-care-study/a-60883610 (accessed: 07.08.2022) Deliverable D2.7 Page 147 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe feelings of isolation due to the fact, according to GER05Tatjana00, that women place more value on sociality: ‘That's why social interaction is sometimes even more important for women than it is for men.’ The additional responsibility for childcare placed an extra burden on many women, causing psychological stress. To GER05Kerstin00, ‘women are more affected by the pandemic because women are usually more sensitive. So when there are difficulties and problems, then the women deal with them much more intensively. I think most men can sort of process that faster somehow or can repress it and stuff like that. And for women I think this psychological burden is heavier.’ As a result of the lockdown and forced isolation, GERUlrike50a suffered a series of panic attacks. Being unable to socialise and interact with other people reminded her of her abusive childhood, stuck at home with a violent, alcoholic mother: ‘Just these mental images [of my childhood], to think there are many more families than you think where domestic violence takes place behind closed doors.’ One positive upside of COVID was that many men were required to work remotely from home for the first time and thus discovered what it was like for women to work ‘with screaming children in the home office’ (GER01Simone40a). Although he needed to be taught when his daughter’s meal times and nap times were, GER02Emma30b’s husband did eventually recognise that he was able to look after his child for a few hours a day without neglecting his work. What is important to stress is that not all women shared the belief that the impact of the lockdown was harder on them than on men. For those who did not think the impact of the lockdown was gendered in its effects, one common explanation was it was ‘more about the job than the gender’ (GER05Leonie00). GER04Martina00 agreed that the impact of the lockdown was linked more to the professional sector in which one was working, arguing that ‘there are also male hairdressers who have suffered from it [the lockdown]’. However, in her example, the man who had been badly affected by the lockdown worked in a sector that is more traditionally associated with women; we can therefore infer that the closure of hairdressing salons did affect women more than men and the impact of the closures was thus gendered. Similarly, GER04Tamara00 argued that the lockdown affected ‘both sides equally, both men and women’ and this depended on whether it was the husband or the wife who stayed at home with the children, while the other went to work. However, in Germany, women are much more likely to stay at home with the children, undermining GER04Tamara00’s claim that the impact of the lockdown is not gendered. In addition, fathers are only half as likely to take parental leave as new mothers.36 To GER02Emma30b, this is due to the fact that this could be used against men when applying for promotion, etc. In addition, she continued, ‘men still live with the basic idea that they have to look after the family alone. Although that's no longer true these days.’ 36 Ibid. Deliverable D2.7 Page 148 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe While the lockdown has had a disproportionate impact on women, who have been expected to assume greater responsibility for childcare during the lockdown than their husbands, and many women referred to the impact using language that hinted at retraditionalisation, i.e. a return to traditional gender norms, this assumes gender roles had been more equal prior to the pandemic. However, as GER02Cathrin20b cogently sums it up, ‘I think this pandemic is amplifying all the inequalities that we already have in our society, and that means that inequalities based on gender are also increasing.’ Whereas anger at elites and distrust of science prompted a political response on the part of many of our respondents, this was not the case with the gendered impact of the government’s anti-COVID measures. As the Affect visualisation (above) shows, women understood the reasons for the lockdown and did not therefore consider it unfair. Their anger was not thus provoked by the lockdown per se and thus not directed at the government but by those who refused to be vaccinated, thereby prolonging the lockdown and the women’s ensuing childcare responsibilities. Figure 25: the codes for Retraditionalisation, GENinequality, Patriarchy and Childcare and their deepest Deliverable D2.7 Page 149 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe associations ( ).𝑑≥6 *LAinsecurity: Job insecurity, *GENinequality: Gender inequality, *SAsupdef: Social anomie and social relations: support deficit Figure 25 shows us how retraditionalisation is linked to gender. In the visualisation we can see three other codes: gender inequality (GENinequality), patriarchy and childcare. These four codes are connected to one another and to the impact of COVID-19 (not shown) by deep associations ( ). Figure 23 supports the key insights from 𝑑≥12 the ethnographic data that impact of the lockdown was gendered in its effects in that responsibility for childcare, parenting and home-schooling lay overwhelmingly with women. To balance childcare with working responsibilities meant that they were more likely to work remotely from home, while men often continued to go to work. The visualisation provides further support to the insight discussed with reference to Affect that many women found the lockdown emotionally difficult as they lost ac-cess to their networks of support and thus felt socially isolated. As the testimonies of many of our female respondents made clear, combining a career with children was hard enough before the pandemic, with many women reporting that they experienced sexism and unequal treatment when they returned to work after ma-ternity leave, resulting in feelings of job insecurity. Two broader debates about gender that emerged from the ethnographic data are also reflected in the visualisations: firstly, that the greater responsibility for childcare that women had to take on reflected a process of retraditionalisation of gender roles and, secondly, that the gender inequality that became apparent during the lockdown simply amplified patriarchal structures that already existed. Unsurprisingly, the respondents who discussed these issues were almost exclusively women, a fact also confirmed by the visualisation. 2.3.5. Network analysis and visualisations summary The visualisations serve to triangulate the insights from the ethnographic data. They support the view that German society was polarised as a result of the government response to the COVID pandemic, to some extent fuelled by misinformation or the manipulation of data. They also highlight the emotional response to the lockdown. The visualisation further supports the difficulty highlighted in the ethnographic data of disentangling the respondents’ opposition to the vaccine and their anger at the government in that the anti-vax sentiment had as much to do with the political implementation of the vaccination programme than with distrust in the vaccines themselves. The Gender visualisation highlighted the debate in the ethnographic data between women who argue that the greater responsibility for childcare that women had to take on reflected a process of retraditionalisation of gender roles and those who believe that the gender inequality that became apparent during the lockdown simply amplified patriarchal structures that already existed. Deliverable D2.7 Page 150 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe The visualisations bring out the gender dimensions of the ethnographic data. They highlight the differential impact of the lockdown on men and women, with responsibility for childcare and home-schooling falling almost exclusively on women. With regard to the emotional response to the lockdown, the visualisation demonstrated that the key emotions did not necessarily feed into each other. While women were angry at those prolonging the lockdown, they did not feel it was unfair. The visualisation highlights three of the most commonly referenced affects – emotional difficulty, unfairness and anger – and the events associated with them. As highlighted repeatedly by our respondents, the government-imposed lockdown was found to be emotionally difficult as it cut them off from their networks of support. The visualisation shows that women were affected more than men, supporting the insights from the interviews that it was women who were more likely to suffer from feelings of isolation due to the fact they were more likely to stay at home, while men often continued to go to work. Secondly, the visualisation supports the insight from the ethnographic data that women found the gender inequality reinforced or exposed by the lockdown to be unfair. Finally, the visualisation highlighted the anger and frustration that the COVID pandemic provoked among our respondents, with the anger directed primarily at those who refused to be vaccinated. While we had initially assumed that the three emotions would be interrelated, the visualisation showed that they were, in fact, discreet. From this we could infer that, while the lockdown was emotionally difficult for many women, they did understand the reasons for it and did not therefore consider it unfair. Their anger was not thus provoked by the lockdown per se but by those who refused to be vaccinated, thereby prolonging the lockdown and the women’s ensuing childcare responsibilities, which in turn exacerbated the gender inequality at home and in society at large. Further research can examine in greater detail men and women’s different emotional responses to the lockdown, elucidated by the visualisations and the ethnographic data. Deliverable D2.7 Page 151 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe 2.4. Key findings and conclusions Among several analytical distinctions that help to organise the massive literature on the rise of populism in recent years, one of the most effective is the one between the demand and supply sides of the phenomenon. While the latter has been studied in several POPREBEL sub-projects, here we report on an in-depth study of the demand side. As we indicated earlier, we decided not to ask people about their views on or support for (right-wing) populism directly, but to engage them in a conversation in which they would share with us their concerns, loosely related to the idea of wellbeing. We assumed that we would eventually learn about the respondents’ political choices or at least their general political-ideological predilections from the way they would link choices and concerns using a map of the socio-political reality they carry in their heads. The picture that emerges from the ethnographic narratives based on the more traditional qualitative-narrative interpretation of the interview material and the semantic network analysis of the coded interview transcripts is complex but there are several common threats that run through all three communities of discourse. People raise several issues that signal the existence of agitated, disturbed, and untrustful societies, traumatised by the pandemic, but concerned not only with the impact of this calamity on their lives. They have other concerns, related to their sense that the system is out of whack and does not provide the sufficient level of support for the people. It is easy to see why at least some elements of the populist ideology promoted by various actors resonate with people so strongly. Before we offer several closing thoughts, we review the main findings of each case study. 2.4.1. The Czech Republic: ●Political disillusionment across socioeconomic classes, demographics and political beliefs – primarily rooted in a series of corruption scandals following 1989. The political representatives from left to right are seen as corrupt, morally compromised, working for their own interests (enriching themselves). ●People’s electoral choices are often inconsistent – swinging from left to the right – they are much more driven by immediate perceptions, affective intensification and ‘feeling of familiarity/closeness.’ Personalisation of politics. ●Communism represents a key historical node, through which people navigate and interpret their socioeconomic realities and wider geopolitical trends. This primarily takes the form of ‘anti-nostalgia’, Deliverable D2.7 Page 152 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe rather than an overly romanticised view of the past. ●The EU – for the more conservative participants, the EU is seen as an essentially oppressive structure, which is imposing its norms, regulations and values onto ‘us’. It is closely associated with the historical memory of foreign domination and that the perceived unsuccessful postsocialist transformation is supposedly linked to the Czech accession to the EU. A wider spectrum of participants (not just conservative/illiberal) are fairly sceptical of the institution and have their reservations. ●The anti-covid movement – the pandemic has given rise to a new anti-systemic illiberal force in the society, which was fairly fringe/marginal, but with the developing economic crisis (energies, inflation, war) has grown substantially (at the forefront of anti-government protests. So the anti-covid movement’s anti-vaccination positions, conspiratorial theories, excessive nationalism and numerous other phenomena have merged into an ideological conglomerate which is inseparably intertwined with populist rhetoric. 2.4.2. Poland: ●Pandemic side-effects. All interviewees share an impression that the pandemic has had a generalised effect of not only exposing already existing social and systemic issues, but also enhancing them. The viral pandemic and the economic recession reinforced the belief in self-reliance and further weakened people’s trust in the state and broader society. ●Polarisation. There is a strong conviction among the study participants that Polish society is very divided, fragmented, and increasingly polarised, due to the conflict dynamics between the current PiS government and the main opposition party, PO. The perceived division builds on two main sets of values, centered around a positive or a negative take on self-reliance: (1) individualization, where self-reliance is seen as the ultimate goal, something that ought to be sought after, as the state or the society in general, and political elites in particular,are seen to be ultimately unreliable and untrustworthy; (2) togetherness, where the current push for individual self-reliance is seen as a negative turn, a sign that the condition of the society, the state, or the community is worsening, unable to take care of the individual as it should within a well-functioning and carrying welfare state. ●Abortion. The 2020-2021 changes to the abortion law sparked controversies across Polish society. Participants of the study unanimously were critical of the change, irrespective of their political leanings or whether they identified as pro-choice or in favour of the so-called abortion compromise. Those interviewees, who broadly discussed the matter, saw the change as a violation of their liberty or the right of self-determination. Semantic network analysis showed a gender gap –female respondents saw the issue in the broader context of other social issues, while males more in the context of polarisation and Deliverable D2.7 Page 153 Version 1.0 This document reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.