Entre el poder y el espectáculo : nuevas dimensiones de la cultura política en Polonia

The democratic system in Poland may be considered relatively young and still in development phase. Thus, Polish political culture is under continuous evolution. There is a substantial generational difference regarding the attitude towards politics in Poland: the old generations of Poles who have lived under the communist regime are currently getting accustomed to new models of civil participation trying to limit their distrust concerning the State. Contrarily, the young Polish people who haven’t internalized prejudices deriving from the past, tend to compare their experiences with persons of the same age living in other European countries with longer democratic tradition. Over the last 20 years of the socio-political transformation in Poland, the political scene has changed several times: some political experiments have occurred and various political parties and movements headed by different leaders have emerged. Each of them present different programs, ideologies and visions of the future. In times of the media’s power the politics very often turns into performance. The phenomenon of the political and informative spectacle is strictly connected to the appearance of new forms of political communication as well as some new media types like politainment. The scope of the article is to present the phenomenon of the “spectacularization” of the political life in Poland through the analysis of some recent events which have influenced the public discourse: the Polish president’s plane crash in Smolensk in April 2010 and its political and socio-cultural consequences; the last electoral campaign in October 2011, the emergence of the controversial political movement Ruch Palikota and the resulting changes in the field of political culture in Poland.