Photo courtesy of Tomasz Molina via Wikimedia Commons
By Kiera McLaughlin ’26
Global Editor
Content warning: This article discusses racism and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people.
This past week, thousands of people, many of them women and youths, turned out to the polls in record numbers, taking the Poland election into their own hands to oust the conservative Law and Order party, also known as the PiS.
The Oct. 15 election was the most consequential in the country since 1989, motivating thousands of people to vote on the future of Poland’s democracy in the Sejm, one of the two houses that make up Poland’s National Assembly, according to the Atlantic Council.
The Law and Justice Party has had the political majority in Poland since 2015. In the face of the election, PiS attempted to attack the rights of migrants by spreading false rhetoric about migrants in Poland and their supposed connections to crime by using propaganda that depicted them as dangerous. These ideas were promoted to instill fear prior to a referendum vote regarding immigration to Poland, according to the Human Rights Watch Organization.
While PiS continues to be the most influential party in Poland, with the recent election, the opposition party — the progressive Civic Coalition led by Donald Tusk, the former president of the European Council — has gained seats in parliament, along with other liberal parties like The Left and the Third Way party, BBC News reported. Unlike PiS, the Civic Coalition, now the largest progressive party, ran on a pro-European Union platform. It made promises to reverse undemocratic policies implemented by the PiS party restricting freedom of speech, women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights, according to The New York Times.
During their time in power, PiS attempted to criminalize homosexuality and spread hateful anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment. According to Them Magazine, Poland was named the worst country in the European Union for LGBTQ+ people by the annual Rainbow Europe Index from 2020 to 2023, based on inequalities and discrimination in legal and societal practice. In 2019, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, chairman of PiS, said that homosexuality is a “threat to Polish identity, to our nation, to its existence, and thus to the Polish state,” The New York Times reported.
Beginning in 2019, Polish towns and regions began declaring themselves “LGBT-free zones.” By 2020, there were almost 100 of these districts, Them Magazine reported. The Human Rights Organization said local authorities created these districts to “protect children from moral corruption” by criminalizing “LGBT ideology.” One-third of local authorities implemented anti-LGBTQ+ policies after the Law and Justice party made “protecting” Poland the main target of their campaign. There are still 56 towns with anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Poland as of May 2023.
Along with discriminatory policies and the promotion of anti-LGBTQ+ ideology, the PiS party also passed an extensive ban on abortion in nearly all instances. Voted on in 2020, the “near-total” abortion ban was put into effect starting in January 2021, according to The New York Times.
In addition to attacking the Civic Coalition campaign, PiS targeted the migrant population in Poland as well as in Europe more broadly. Several human rights groups allege that prior to the election, PiS used misinformation about the supposed danger posed by migrants to create panic, which failed to rally anti-migrant ideals and support for their party.
The PiS party had a referendum on the vote alongside the Oct. 15 election, asking voters about “illegal immigrants,” AP News reported. This referendum addressed the EU relocation plan and asked voters the question: “Do you support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa under the forced relocation mechanism imposed by the European bureaucracy?”
In response to the referendum, the Human Rights Watch Organization said the annex of the vote “contains misleading information designed to influence citizens to vote in support of the government’s anti-migrant agenda. It deliberately omits the fact that the EU migration pact doesn’t force any country to accept relocated migrants … .”
This referendum came with a campaign video announcing the question from Mateusz Moraviecki, the prime minister of Poland and a member of the PiS party, on social media, which included footage of violence taking place in the streets of Western Europe and a visual of a Black man “apparent[ly] anticipating” to commit a crime while licking a knife. These videos were followed by PiS chairman Kaczynski asking the viewer, “Do you want this to happen in Poland as well?” AP News reported.
In a video targeting Donald Tusk, Morawiecki said, “Let’s not let Tusk — as an envoy of the Brussels elites — demolish security in Poland.”
This also comes at a time when Poland is hosting more than 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees, according to The New York Times. Support for these Ukrainian refugees remains a cross-partisan issue even for the PiS Party, the Atlantic Council stated.
In addition to losing the majority seats in parliament, PiS’s attempt with the referendum failed as it never reached the 50% participation from the population that it needed to be a valid vote, AP News reported. Some voters boycotted the referendum in protest of the question of migration and the bias displayed by the PiS party’s choice of rhetoric.
The election, however, was a huge win for the Civic Coalition and progressives in Poland. According to BBC News, voter turnout was at a record high of over 74% and, polls showed that 68.8% of voters were under the age of 29.
“I have never been so happy in my life with this supposed second place, Poland won, democracy won. We removed them from power,” Tusk said in a speech following the election, according to POLITICO.
According to AP News, it is likely that Tusk will return to being the Polish prime minister, a role he previously served in from 2007 to 2014. Now, three progressive opposition parties to PiS make up 53.7% of the house of parliament. President of Poland Andrzej Duda will have to call the first session of parliament within 30 days after the election and appoint a new prime minister, AP News reported.
With this new progressive majority, civil rights groups are ready to advocate for reimplementing democratic practices, reproductive rights and protections for the LGBTQ+ community, according to NPR. In an interview with NPR, Hurbert Sobecki, spokesperson for Love Does Not Exclude, said of the sudden change in political leadership that “it’s like living in a toxic household with a violent partner, and suddenly you’re free of them.”
Sobecki continued by asking, “How can you learn to live again?”
While the Civic Coalition campaigned on restoring abortion rights to the Polish population, Natalia Broniarczyk, a reproductive rights activist, told NPR that she is not optimistic about the new progressive parliament. “I think that they are not brave enough to be supporters of legal abortion on demand. And to be honest, I don’t have any hope if it comes to Donald Tusk because he promised so many times legal abortion.”
One thing is certain: when young voters took to the election polls on Oct. 15, their votes made changes in the Polish government. In interviews with The Guardian, many young people shared feeling hopeful. Michal Grabarski, a 25-year-old voter, said, “This record turnout among young people demonstrates that we’ve had enough. Prohibitions don’t work with young people — they want to love whom they want and decide about themselves.”