On June 1, the citizens of Poland elected Karol Nawrocki as their next president. With a record-breaking turnout, the candidate supported by the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party secured over 300,000 votes more than the liberal mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski. Nawrocki will replace Andrzej Duda, who steps down after two five-year terms in office, the maximum permitted by the Polish constitution.

As is the case in almost every Western democratic country, the electoral campaign in Poland deepened the shift from traditional media to social media, where far-right candidates, in particular, successfully developed a platform for direct communication with voters and essentially circumvented established media channels. This prompted questions about citizens’ ability to filter out disinformation in a country where readership levels are low — according to a survey conducted for the National Library of Poland (BN), 43% of Poles declared that they read at least one book in 2023. It was the highest result of the annual survey except for 2020, when a bump in redearship correlated with pandemic-era lockdowns.

To gain a deeper understanding of how societal changes are impacting contemporary democracies, Harbingers’ reporters participated in the Literacy for Democracy international conference, organised by the Universal Reading Foundation (FPC) in Warsaw.

Harbingers’ reporters interviewed experts participating in the conference and discussed three subjects that, in their opinion, were key to understanding the reading habits of young people. Antoni Popczyński, in conversation with Tomasz Morek, challenged the widespread opinion that it is young people who primarily contribute to low reading statistics, Sonia Rybus and Aleksandra Tomaszewska discussed the importance of making a distinction between pleasant page-turners and challenging reading, and Mateusz Sarna, as the devil’s advocate, went to explain the point of view of those who consider books just one of possible forms of engaging with culture.