Foreign Policy Counter-Elite and Durability of Populist Foreign Policy

This article examines how and why populist governments seek to transform foreign policy institutions through the establishment of a counter-elite. It conceptualizes the counter-elite as the missing link between populist power consolidation and the durability of populist foreign policy, arguing that its level of institutionalization determines whether populist foreign policy changes become entrenched or remain reversible. The framework is applied to Poland under the Law and Justice party (PiS) from 2015 to 2023, using official documents, secondary literature, and anonymized interviews with policymakers and experts. Focusing on PiS’s flagship foreign policy project, the Three Seas Initiative (TSI), the analysis shows that although PiS effectively deinstitutionalized existing foreign policy structures, it failed to build a coherent and self-replicating counter-elite. As a result, foreign policy remained dependent on political incumbency, limiting the institutional reproduction of the populist agenda and leading to the marginalization of the TSI after PiS’s electoral defeat in 2023.