Politics Turned Into a Playground Drama: Infantilisation of the Election Campaign for the Polish Parliament (2023) Due to Mediatisation

This article examines the phenomenon of infantilisation in the 2023 Polish parliamentary election campaign. Infantilisation is a consequence of the mediatisation of politics, a process that has transformed electoral competition into a spectacle, while aligning political communication with mass media logic. The introductory section outlines the electoral context, during which politicians deliberately incited conflicts to provoke strong emotions, thereby encouraging the media to engage with and amplify these issues through simplified and conventionalised narratives. The second section delves into the theoretical foundations of infantilisation. It identifies several mechanisms contributing to this trend, including mediatisation, which has reshaped political operations and communication by reducing them to simplistic, emotionally charged messages. The third section addresses the methodological framework, detailing the use of discourse and narrative analysis to analyse media coverage of political conflicts. The author’s findings demonstrate how different media outlets constructed narratives surrounding the provoked conflicts.