Chapter 11: Minorities and Minority Rights as a Problem for Populist Politics—The German Minority in Poland—A Case Study

Abstract At the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, for the first time since the democratic breakthrough of 1989, legislation was introduced into Polish law that overtly discriminated against a specific social group. The implemented changes affected the sphere of teaching German as a national minority language. Under an administrative procedure, the pool of public funds that had been used to finance the teaching of this language, as well as the number of teaching hours, was reduced. The background and political justification for the changes was the desire to exert pressure on the German authorities to improve the quality and level of funding for Polish language teaching in Germany. The article is an attempt to present the problem from a historical and political perspective by defining the motives and effects of implementing this discriminatory legislation, from an international perspective by placing it in the space of Polish-German relations, and also from a systemic perspective by characterising the legal and financial mechanisms for supporting national and ethnic minorities in Poland.