What do Conservatives Want from Democracy? Polish Constitutional Experiment from a Right-Wing Perspective
PanelFlorence School of Transnational Governance, Florence, Italy
25/02/2026
Moderator dr. MAGDALENA M. BARAN
Speaker Prof. KALYPSO NICOLAIDIS
Speaker Prof. ADAM CZARNOTA
Speaker Prof. TOMASZ GRZEGORZ GROSSE
Conservatives are often portrayed as obstacles to democracy rather than its co-authors. Let’s Agree on Poland: A Case Study of Constitutional Design (Oxford University Press, 2025), an ambitious experiment in constitutional imagination, takes the opposite view by asking what conservatives actually want from democracy. Described in the influential Polityka weekly as “the most important book about Polish politics after 1989,” the book reflects the work of 130 progressive and conservative intellectuals in the Social Contract Incubator (IUS), who together designed a constitutional framework intended to speak across ideological divides. This Florence panel will highlight the right-wing voices within IUS. Conservative members will explain their motivations for joining the project and how their values are reflected in the final proposals. Of particular interest is Part II of the book, in which experts and fiction writers collaborated to create “dream regions” under the proposed constitutional order. The co-author of the deeply conservative region will discuss how this fictional scenario illuminated conservative political aspirations in contemporary Poland — aspirations that may resonate across Europe. An important aspect of the debate will also be examining the similarities and differences between the conservative position and the positions currently held by both liberals and representatives of the left. Only when considered as a whole can they provide a picture of the areas where we are asking about a scenario for agreement, as well as the framework of the democratic system available and implemented by each option.

