It's as if rules no longer apply in the final stretch of the longest and most brutal election campaign in Poland's recent history, if they ever did. At the same time as the opposition's show of strength with an impressive demonstration in Warsaw on Sunday, October 1, the conservative nationalist party Law and Justice (PiS) – in power since 2015 – held its biggest-ever convention in front of almost 15,000 people in Katowice, in the southwest of the country.

The aim of this great American-style show was above all to mobilize a fickle electorate. Despite the huge benefit increases of recent years, polling shows that PiS has under 35% of voting intentions, compared with 43.5% in the 2019 parliamentary elections. After eight years of populist rule in a deeply divided society, hunting on the opponent's turf is now out of the question. The PiS strategy is to push the polarization to the limit. It is no longer just political opponents who are designated as the nation's enemies, but their entire electorate.

The program of the ultraconservative party, whose slogan, "A safe Poland," echoes the war in Ukraine – being carried out just a few hundred kilometers from Warsaw – can be summed up in four "no" votes. "No to the massive reception of illegal immigrants"; "no to the removal of the wall" erected on the Polish-Belarusian border to stop migrants; "no to raising the retirement age" and "no to the sale [to foreign capital] of Polish companies." It doesn't matter that these items are not on the opposition's policy platform. These four questions will be asked in a much-criticized referendum, to be held on the same day as the legislative elections.

The culture wars that made the PiS so successful in the past, such as the fight against "LGBT ideology" and the defense of former Polish Pope John Paul II against "liberal attacks," are no longer popular. What remains is the issue of migration. "Poland remains the last bastion of normality and security in Europe," MEP Dominik Tarczynski said at the podium. "We will save Europe, its Christian values, against political correctness and those who want to turn Poland into a second Lampedusa." But even this campaign theme has been tarnished by a recent corruption scandal at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which exposed a large-scale process of selling Polish visas in southern countries.

The PiS's main target, who has been on everyone's lips and has become an obsession for the past eight years, is the leader of the main opposition party, former prime minister and president of the European Council Donald Tusk. For Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Katowice, this means "defending Poland against the Tusk system," which is a "German-Russian condominium" and a "system of organized plundering of state assets."

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