Maria WITKOWSKA-GUTKOWSKA: Against “Anschluss” of Poland

The purpose of the present article is the analysis and description of linguistic persuasive strategies employed in propaganda articles, whose aim was to encourage the audience to vote against Poland’s accession to European Union in the referendum. In their pursuit to invoke anxiety connected with the unknown future, the authors of the articles used vocabulary, collocations, negatively evaluating persuasive names for phenomena which might be associated with the EU. They exploited national prejudice pointing to the emergence of the “German problem”. In their arguments they most frequently made use of argumenta ad populum.