October 27, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – The victory of the conservative Law and Justice Party in Sunday’s parliamentary election has given the nation’s pro-lifers hope they can soon ban abortion in the largely Catholic country.
Law and Justice has been out of office since 2007, replaced in the meantime by the business-oriented Civic Platform Party. According to unofficial counts, Law and Justice has 39 percent of the vote, to Civic Platform’s 23 percent, with a smattering of smaller parties splitting the balance.
“Most of the Law and Justice MPs were pro-life in the last parliament,” Mariusz Dzierzawski of the Right to Life Foundation told LifeSiteNews. “Now maybe they will be in the majority. But without pressure from pro-life organizations like ours probably they will do nothing.”
Three times since 2011 pro-life activists have gathered many times over the required 100,000 signatures to put abortion-banning measures before Parliament only to see each fail against the Civic Platform-dominated membership. “Maybe we will have success if we go for signatures in 2016,” said Dzierzawski.
But this election (whose final result awaits expatriate returns for overseas and especially, Great Britain) was not fought on the abortion issue. The foreign press says Poland’s “lurch to the right” was a reaction to the pro-Europe, pro-foreign investment policies of the Civic Platform, plus its acquiescence to pressure to accept Syrian refugees. The UK Guardian described the winner as “a Eurosceptic party that is against immigration, wants family-focused welfare spending and has threatened to ban abortion and in-vitro fertilisation. … In deepest Poland politics is shaped by love of church…and hatred of Brussels.”
But Dzierzawski takes a simpler view: “Poles are tired of their lies,” he told LifeSiteNews, referring to the scandals dogging the outgoing regime. “And their policies were very, very bad.”
Conservative Poles want a more independent country that resists left wing and sexually permissive policies. A recent mass resistance to the introduction of a radical sex education program forced the government to back down. A similar pushback from parents in the 1950s forced the Communist regime to put Catholic catechism into the state school curriculum and the Solidarity movement famously grew from a wildcat labour action into a resistance campaign big enough to topple the government, and, some say, the Soviet Bloc.
Without such popular pressure, Dzierzawski said, “Politicians don’t want to do anything morally conservative. It’s true all over Europe, in Spain, in Canada, conservative politicians try to do nothing because they think it is unpopular.”
The parliamentary election should see Beata Szydlo become prime minister. She is a miner’s daughter who achieved prominence when as campaign manager for Andrzej Duda, she engineered the Law and Justice candidate’s victory in the May presidential election.
Because of the double victory the pro-life movement has a chance to change the law and even the constitution without fear of a presidential veto.