ABSTRACT
The Polish case offers a compelling example of the problems faced by a governing party when confronted with a crisis it did not initiate and whose course and consequences it cannot control. This chapter argues that the response of the Law and Justice (PiS) government to the pandemic was a mixture of technocratic crisis management and opportunistic illiberalism. The circumstances of the pandemic allowed PiS to articulate endogenous crisis narratives which were unrelated to the pandemic and consistent with their illiberal mode of governance since 2015. However, the need to manage an exogenous crisis effectively amid concerns about state capacity militated against populist crisis performance with respect to the pandemic itself.
