I have to admit that this time, in the presidential campaign, the teams of the various candidates have somehow not particularly shown off. All the slogans are very similar to each other. ‘Long live Poland’ by Andrzej Duda, “Safe Poland” by Robert Biedroń or “Hope for Poland” by Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz seem to be one template with an interchangeable accent, which the individual candidates emphasise more strongly. Rafał Trzaskowski with his ‘Strong President – Common Poland’ slightly stands out in this competition by using a two-part slogan. Szymon Hołownia’s slogan ‘With head and heart we will change Poland’ seems to be the most sophisticated. Krzysztof Bosak’s idea of a slogan ‘Naprzód Polsko’, on the other hand, is secondary. It is a carbon copy of Silvio Berlusconi’s election slogan ‘Forza Italia’, which later became the name of the Italian politician’s party.
Whatever else one may say, the electoral staff opted for a simple message, without any finesse. There is no poetics in these slogans such as that of Marek Borowski’s ‘Right Man of the Left’ or Barack Obama’s ‘Yes, we can’. The current slogans are in keeping with the rhetoric of the presidential campaign. It is straightforward and speaks plainly, without wrapping itself in cotton. The vocabulary, comparisons and arguments are created at a level of perception accessible to a junior high school student or even a fourth-grade primary school pupil. All this is done in order to get the message across to as many voters as possible.
Presidential election 2020
And this is where the not-so-optimistic but true conclusion comes in. A large part of the population has a very low level of knowledge. They are often guided by thought patterns and theses pushed under their noses, which are often manipulated information. Repeated over and over again, a statement gains strength and becomes dogma. ‘Total opposition’, “we have had enough”, “LGBT ideology”. These are the phrases that unite supporters of one presidential candidate or another. They cause the integration of a particular group and identify it. They are simple and often repeated, even though they may have little to do with truth or reality, but that is the least important thing in the political rhetoric of our time. What is important is to persuade as many voters as possible, using all available means, including manipulation, social engineering and half-truths.
As early as 15 years ago, one of the pioneers of contemporary propaganda, Jacek Kurski, when asked by Tomasz Lis why he even started to make up Donald Tusk’s grandfather in the Wehrmacht, replied: ‘With this Wehrmacht it is a lame duck, but we are going with it, because the dark people will buy it’.
And now it’s all about getting the ‘dark people’ to support one candidate or another.
All rights reserved