Eurasia Press & News
After a week of women’s protests that show no sign of letting up, the governing party’s poll numbers are dropping as its leaders scramble out mixed messages about the anti-abortion court ruling they were responsible for.
The streets of Warsaw on Wednesday night looked nothing short of revolutionary. And, with a government forced onto the back foot and cynically trying to depict the protests in terms of a culture war between feminists and Catholic, there is a certainly a revolutionary spirit in the air, which promises to have far-reaching implications for the country.
Protests were organised on Wednesday in 80 Polish towns and 20 locations abroad, as women across the country took the day off from work to take part in a general strike, called after the country’s constitutional court, illegally filled with government appointees, last week outlawed abortion in cases where the foetus is severely damaged or malformed, which in practice means that almost all forms of abortion are banned. More demonstrations are planned for the following days, including a mass rally in Warsaw on Friday.
Wednesday’s protests in Warsaw saw, on each avenue leading to the Polish Sejm (lower house of parliament), where Law and Justice (PiS) leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski was at the time, crowds of people blocking the exits to the building, shouting anti-PiS slogans and blasting songs from mobile phones.
A few kilometres away, thousands of young people were gathering in front of the main building of Warsaw University, on Krakowskie Przedmiescie street, to take part in what they called “the Polish students’ strike”. They would later march to join those outside the parliament.
In the centre of the city, demonstrators filled the pavements and streets, with cars honking in solidarity. Walls were covered in graffiti with the slogans of the women’s protests, which have been going on for a week now since the ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal. In the shops around the city centre, people carried banners or had the red lightning sign, a symbol of the protest movement, painted on their cheeks or on their masks and clothes.
The women’s protests have fostered some unlikely alliances. Earlier in the day, protesting farmers had blocked another part of the city centre, with one of their leaders saying that, “farmers and women could ruin PiS”. Teachers and care workers were just some of the groups that have recently added their support to the women’s protests, which have already received backing from taxi and bus drivers, entrepreneurs and even some football fans over the last few days.
The protests are starting to have an effect on the government’s popularity. On Wednesday, the first public opinion poll (by Kantar for the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper) conducted since the women’s protests started indicated a sharp drop in support for the governing party, with only 26 per cent of those surveyed favouring PiS compared with 24 per cent for the main opposition Civic Coalition, 18 per cent for the party of independent Christian-Democrat Szymon Holownia (which currently does not have any seats in parliament), and 8 per cent each for the left-wing and far-right alliances. This is the lowest PiS has polled since it came to power in 2015.
Church and state
On Tuesday, the informal leaders of the women’s movement announced their demands at a press conference. They included, among other things, the resignation of the government, the de-politicisation of the courts, the separation of church and state, reproductive rights, and budget reform to include more money for the health system, workers, entrepreneurs and culture.
In response, PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski made a public statement on Tuesday night in which he said the protesters were engaging in criminal behaviour (he referred to the serious epidemiological situation in the country and the fact that gatherings of more than five people are prohibited) and that they posed a threat to both Poland and the Catholic Church.
Kaczynski then called on PiS supporters to “defend” the churches that he claimed were coming under attack (over the previous days, protesters had disrupted religious services and chanted at priests to stop getting involved in political life).
Far-right leaders, including Robert Bakiewicz, a main organiser of the annual Independence Day march, had already declared their readiness to help. Bakiewicz promised to create a “national guard” to defend Catholic institutions and believers from what he called the “neo-Bolshevik revolutionaries”. Over the past few days, far-right activists and their allies have already physically removed protesting women from churches. On Wednesday, many of the churches in the city centre were equipped with two lines of defence: on the steps stood far-right or Catholic fundamentalist group members, and in front, close to the streets where the protesters were passing, were lines of the police.
Except no protestors have attempted to attack the churches. On the contrary, in several locations across Poland, there were reports of these so-called “church defenders” moving onto the streets and attacking women protestors.
Many were quick to see through Kaczynski’s appeal as a cynical attempt to depict the protests in terms of a culture war between feminists and Catholics and to distract from the widespread dissatisfaction with the government, caused not only by the anti-abortion ruling, but also by what many consider its disastrous management of the coronavirus pandemic.
Instead of continuing protests outside churches, protesters on Wednesday focused their efforts on where the loci of power in Poland lies: in a parliament dominated by PiS, the PiS party headquarters, and around Kaczynski himself.
On Wednesday night, the ruling camp appeared to switch tactics again. After Kaczynski’s uncompromising public statements the previous day, President Andrzej Duda appeared in public after a long silence (and coronavirus-related isolation) to say that “he understood the women who were protesting, despite the fact that each has their own views”.
Duda’s wife, Agata Kornhauser-Duda, infamous for her low-profile approach to her position as first lady, accompanied the president in his intervention, to say she had doubts about whether women should be forced to be heroic. This was a reference to the women who will now be forced to carry the pregnancy to term only to see the sick baby die soon after.
Duda’s intervention is being taken as another sign that the governing camp might be preparing a tactical retreat: to propose a law in which abortion is banned for foetuses with Down syndrome, but allowed for more serious conditions.
Back on the streets, hardly anyone would consider this an acceptable solution. The protests look like they will continue for some time yet.
