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Two years ago Anna Pięta helped lead a successful campaign that encouraged Polish women to vote for Donald Tusk’s pro-EU coalition and oust the rightwing Law and Justice (PiS) party from power.
But ahead of Poland’s presidential election on May 18, Pięta is no longer mobilising women to vote.
Instead, she is co-running an abortion centre in Warsaw, which opened in March in response to what many women see as Tusk’s most glaring broken promise: failing to overturn the near-total abortion ban imposed by PiS.
“I really thought that, after all we did to bring democratic forces back to power, we would really change this country forever,” Pięta said. “I’m completely amazed by how little they [Tusk’s coalition] have done, particularly for us, the women.”
Tusk promised on his 2023 campaign trail to undo the near-total ban on abortion introduced by the PiS government. Women soon became a driving force behind the record turnout in the parliamentary elections that year, paving the way for his return to power.
But women’s interest in the upcoming presidential election is now 10 percentage points lower than men’s, according to pollster Ibris. “The current structure of declared turnout is significantly different from what we observed in 2023,” said Marcin Duma, Ibris chief executive.
Predicting how women will vote has become “much more complicated” because “many women now feel very disappointed”, said Agnieszka Kasińska-Metryka, politics professor at Kielce University.
Women’s apparent lack of interest in the presidential race could benefit Sławomir Mentzen, whose far-right Confederation party has strong support among young men. Mentzen rejects LGBTQ rights and has recently stated that abortion should be denied even to victims of rape.
Still, the candidate backed by Tusk’s party, Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, is likely to mobilise women if not for the first round, at least ahead of the June 1 run-off. Opinion polls show Trzaskowski ahead at about 32 per cent, followed by the PiS candidate Karol Nawrocki at 25 per cent and Mentzen at 14 per cent.
Kasińska-Metryka said: “There’s probably no other choice for most women than Rafał Trzaskowski.”
Pięta described voting for Trzaskowski in the run-off as “the lesser of two evils”. She added: “I would vomit, then vote for him, and then vomit again.”
Tusk failed to restore abortion rights mainly owing to PiS-led blockades in parliament, courts and veto threats by the country’s President Andrzej Duda — himself a PiS nominee. But conservative lawmakers in Tusk’s coalition also sided with PiS last year and blocked a law that would have decriminalised medical assistance to women seeking an abortion.
Trzaskowski has pledged to resume those efforts if elected president and force the hand of those lawmakers who hid behind PiS and Duda.
“I hope to convince women that there is a much greater chance of changing that legislation if I’m president,” Trzaskowski said in an interview.
Trzaskowski, 53, has sought to position himself as more progressive than Tusk, who is 68. But faced with rising support for ultraconservative views espoused by Mentzen and Nawrocki, he recently hardened his stance on immigration, calling for Ukrainian refugees’ benefits to be cut.
He also distanced himself from the inclusive language previously introduced at Warsaw city hall. “We have two biological sexes, we all know that,” Trzaskowski said in a recent Polsat television interview that drew criticism from LGBTQ activists.
Natalia Broniarczyk, who worked in Poland’s ministry for equality during a previous Tusk government and now co-runs Warsaw’s abortion centre, accused Tusk’s party of “taking women’s vote for granted”. She said the current attitude reminded her of 2015 when PiS came to power after Tusk left the premiership to become president of the European Council. “It feels now similar to 2015, when they forgot about their people,” she said.
Broniarczyk said civil rights remained vulnerable because international funding for NGOs supporting women and minorities evaporated after Tusk’s return to power.
“Donors left after deciding that Poland was back on the right path, when actually legal changes haven’t happened since our government changed,” she said. “It’s also got worse because people are now confused — women who don’t follow politics closely come to us to understand what’s legal or still not legal.”
Her centre, located near the Polish parliament building, faces lawsuits and protests from pro-life activists chanting “This is Poland, not Brussels — nobody supports abortion!”
The clinic’s staff — who call themselves the Abortion Dream Team — offer advice to women who travel abroad for procedures or who obtain abortion pills independently. They cannot inform patients where to obtain that medication, as facilitating abortion remains a crime under Polish law.
Poland’s education minister Barbara Nowacka told the FT that while the abortion law remained “very restrictive”, enforcement was “much more relaxed”.
Women may be “less keen to vote now”, but she argued that abortion rights were only one explanation. After years of activism following PiS’s election in 2015, “women are more demobilised rather than frustrated”.
