How can societies strive to remain democratic? How do they turn away from populism and autocratisation? We address these questions by framing democracy as a system of discursive and performative practices rooted in everyday life and structured by socially shared meanings and emotions. Poland serves as a case study that forms a social laboratory for inquiring about sociopolitical transformations and the dynamics of overcoming the authoritarian tendencies. The chapters collected in the book show that the term ‘democratic shift’ is not a stable, lasting achievement, but merely a moment in a process that proves to be fragile precisely when we stop recognising its momentary nature.