In the fall of 2022, Warsaw was filled with a sense of euphoria as the liberal coalition parties emerged victorious in the first elections for Michal Grzebowski, a Sociology and Political Science student. After eight years of ultra-conservative drift under Law and Justice (PiS), young people like Grzebowski voted to evict the party that had led Poland for so long. However, six months later, sitting with four other young people in a bar in the capital, Grzebowski’s first idea when reflecting on those elections is disappointment.
The center-right Civic Coalition (KO) and the center-left minority party New Left offered similar menus during the 2023 legislative elections. KO promised to recover democracy, rule of law, and place Poland back in Europe while New Left also promised social progress on issues such as abortion rights. Meanwhile, Third Way formed by conservative agrarian party PSL and Christian Democrat Polska 2050 promised another way of doing politics.
The results of the elections have reignited divisions between the minority partners of the coalition around the issue that was key to boosting the young and female vote in October: legalizing abortion after Poland became one of Europe’s most restrictive countries after Malta due to a ruling from its constitutional court controlled by PiS. While KO and Nowa Lewica propose legalizing voluntary interruption of abortion until the 12th week, Third Way defends only returning to pre-constitutional court position on this issue.
Academician Andrzej Rychard responded energetically to this issue saying it is about abortion while feminist activist Marta Lempart criticized that “the Government has not complied with abortion or LGBTQI rights because Christian fundamentalist partners.” Julia Kelsz believes that her generation did not vote for a perfect government but to defeat PiS and warned that abstention is not directly related to abortion but rather local nature or technical difficulties of voting remotely. For Grzebowski, however, it’s important to see what happened on his country’s border with Belarus where “hot returns continue” and people continue to die in forest due to Tusk’s anti-immigration speech which he compares with PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s speech. Since new Government took power over 1770 expulsions, 25 disappearances and five deaths have been recorded on country’s eastern border according to NGO alliance Grupa Granica
