We now know whose fault it is that Law and Justice lost Poland’s election!
Things have finally been cleared up. It is now known what caused Law and Justice (PiS) to lose the parliamentary elections.
Marek Jurek
It is not their attack on the Constitutional Court or their antagonization of the “judicial caste” – which has incidentally led to there being more outrageous verdicts in Poland today than a decade ago. It is not Law and Justice’s long-standing strategy of polarizing society. Nor is it their intrigues to dismantle Agreement, the party of Jarosław Gowin which was allied with them, or their attacks on the agrarian Polish People’s Party (PSL), even at the expense of giving power to the opposition in some regions. And it is not putting “animal rights” before the needs of farmers and breeders.
It is not their parliamentary arrogance or their recurring practice of forcing the Speaker of the Sejm to repeat the most insignificant votes that were lost in order for it to remain clear that the opposition is not allowed to win any. It is not their attempt to force elections to be held with mail-in ballots and without an election campaign, which would have completely undermined President Duda’s legitimacy, that is so essential in Poland today. It is not even the appetites of the “fat cats.”
No, the most guilty are the unborn!
As former Speaker of the Senate Stanisław Karczewski and current Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki now say in unison, the petition to the Constitutional Tribunal in defense of their rights “was a mistake.” Indeed, it was! I wrote about it in my book 100 Hours of Solitude, as well as before. Their mistake was not in defending the unborn, but in failing to do so: in other words, remaining stubbornly silent about the May 28, 1997 Constitutional Tribunal ruling [that banned abortion on demand in Poland], freezing the debate in the Sejm, and then not thinking about how to conduct the inevitable dispute that would follow; in fact, not taking any advice in this regard. It was also using the Constitutional Tribunal as an instrument to dispense with an issue that the leader of Law and Justice did not feel like dealing with.
How Poland’s Law and Justice failed its pro-life voters on abortion (interview)
Meanwhile, for the Law and Justice politicians those who are least to blame for their defeat are themselves, their opportunism and conformism, as arguably one must have “a bad understanding of politics” to expect them to defy their leader [Jarosław Kaczyński] when he subordinates the policy of Poland’s largest party to his private emotions.
If this is what they think in Law and Justice, then they really need to come to their senses – while there is still time.
This opinion piece was first published in Polish in the Do Rzeczy weekly in November 2023
