October’s Polish elections saw a fresh victory for the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, winning around half the seats in both houses of parliament. This was no big surprise — polls have long indicated that voters would grant PiS a second term in office, without needing to form a coalition. But what calls for deeper reflection is the scale of its victory, with its record-breaking 8 million votes.

Many commentators have explained PiS’s recent successes in terms of its combination of welfare measures and nationalist ideas. Yet more rarely have they delved into the structural reasons for its success, and indeed the weakness of the Left. Yet these are no sudden turn of events; rather, they’re rooted in three decades of transformations in Polish society.

Since the transition from “real socialism” to capitalism that began in 1989, there have been profound changes in the country’s socioeconomic order, especially in the field of labor relations and welfare. But if PiS’s success is often presented as a response to “austerity,” this word is, at the very least, an understatement of the challenges Poles face — and the social malaise feeding the turn to the hard right.