Snares in Poland after election

There is much to agree with in Ann Nukeman’s article on the Polish election (Solidarity 687). I would like to add some further detail on the mobilisation of pro-choice voters and a more critical assessment of Lewica, the main left-wing electoral alliance.

The All-Poland Women’s Strike, the organisation that provided the most prominent leadership in the 2020-21 mass protests against the near-total abortion ban, supplied a website where people could enter their postcode to see a list of politicians in red who do not support abortion.

However, Women’s Strike’s role was minimal and politically poor. Its social media output seldom went beyond the very general aim of getting Law and Justice out of power (“PiS off!”). This reflects a broader tendency to frame the election as Law and Justice versus a largely undifferentiated “progressive” or “democratic” opposition.

Having made virtually no effort to develop an infrastructure that could outlast the 2020-21 protest wave, Women’s Strike has much less organisational strength to intervene now that it is clear that Law and Justice “PiS-ing off” is insufficient to guarantee safe and legal abortions in Poland.

This brings me to Lewica. Despite Lewica candidates from Razem performing much better than their coalition partners in New Left (formed in 2021 from the older social-democratic Democratic Left Alliance and the newer social-liberal Spring), Lewica’s overall vote share decreased from 12.6% to 8.6%.

Considering the highly visible role Razem played in the 2016 Black Protests and 2020-21 Women’s Strike protests for reproductive rights, Lewica suffering a major vote-share decrease in an election where abortion was the second-highest-priority issue for voters after the economy is a bad sign.

Lewica’s leadership and many of its members, including many Razem members, have welcomed entering a governing coalition with Civic Coalition and Third Way. They see this as a way of stopping the far right and passing more progressive policies.

While Civic Coalition is often described as “centrist” or “liberal”, it is really centre-right. Its economic policies and general ideology are thoroughly neoliberal, and its “progressive” stances on social issues are only partial, reluctant concessions.

Civic Platform, the main party in Civic Coalition, opposed abortion legalisation when it was in government from 2007-2015. As Nukeman acknowledges, its current promise to legalise abortion up to twelve weeks is a compromise made under tremendous pressure. Third Way is also centre-right, but opposes even the twelve-week compromise on abortion.

Therefore, we should be frank that Lewica entering a coalition government with Civic Coalition and Third Way means Lewica joining a centre-right government. With Lewica holding only 26 seats to Civic Coalition’s 157 and Third Way’s 65, it is unlikely to force meaningful concessions out of its prospective coalition partners. This means it is almost certain that the coalition will not pass the kinds of bold measures needed to tackle Poland’s inflation and cost-of-living crisis.

Already Lewica has accepted major compromises like the twelve-week abortion limit. During the election, it let vote-chasing and fear of media backlash prevent it from pushing back strongly against Law and Justice’s state-sponsored anti-migrant campaign.

Instead of organising extra-parliamentary pressure on the coalition negotiations, Razem co-chair Adrian Zandberg has stated that “We need to let the people who sit behind these doors and work on the government’s programme simply work”.

In short, Lewica — including Razem — is already showing troubling signs of succumbing to parliamentary horse-trading.

That approach that will neither advance working-class consciousness nor provide an effective bulwark against the still widely-supported far right as the economic crisis continues.