Disco Polo, an extremely popular low-brow Polish musical genre, has recently risen to prominence. For years excluded from the mainstream Polish media and music scene, scorned upon as kitschy and unsophisticated, it has survived remarkably outside the mainstream channels of cultural production and dissemination. But since 2016 Disco Polo has seen a surge in both popularity and media visibility, enabled by the support of prominent government-appointed officials. My paper explores how populist political ideology gets entrenched in public sphere through such cultural policies. I argue that the relationship between Disco Polo and populism is co-constitutive – on the one hand, Disco Polo is a cultural product with an intrinsic populist dimension and as such can be instrumentalised by populist politicians as a genre of popular culture enjoyed by the ‘pure people’, whom these politicians claim to represent. On the other hand, the embrace of Disco Polo by populists has widened its appeal and contributed to its mainstreaming, while at the same time changing the cultural status of the genre.
The paper is a part of a wider project investigating the cultural mechanisms of the rise of right-wing populism in Poland. By focusing on popular and vernacular cultures, the project seeks to bring to light the missing “third element” in the explanations of the rise of populism, complementing the dominant theories centred on economic inequality and anti-liberal backlash.
