In October, the Anglophone world expressed shock at political developments in Poland. “Poland lurches to the right,” the Guardian announced in a headline that typified the reaction of Western European newspapers.

The object of alarm was the October 25 elections, which returned Poland’s socially conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) — led by Jarosław Kaczyński — to power with an unprecedented parliamentary majority. When the dust finally settled, PiS controlled 235 of the 460 seats — something no party had achieved since 1989.

After the victory of Law and Justice’s Andrzej Duda in the presidential election earlier this year, many media outlets fretted that Europe’s success story — economically robust, Western-facing, Europhile, Putin-hating Poland — had flipped. The xenophobes were firmly in control. Poland had succumbed to the wave of authoritarian nationalism sweeping Eastern Europe, embodied most prominently by Hungary’s Viktor Orban.