– I am here to fight for women’s rights in Poland. I think it is very important. I care about my future. That’s what Maja Twarog says, who is one of the many thousands who have turned up at the Castle Square in Warsaw on Sunday. With Polish flags as cloaks, EU flags in their hands and red hearts on their chests, people show their support for Donald Tusk, party leader of the liberal-conservative party Borgarplattforma (PO). – Major changes are in store. This is a sign that Poland is being reborn, says the opposition leader to a cheering crowd. Donald Tusk and the Borgarplattforma will be a counterweight to “madness and extremism”. Photo: WOJTEK RADWANSKI / AFP The last time Donald Tusk invited a protest, over half a million took to the streets – to “fight for democracy”. This time he calls it a “march with a million hearts”: – Everyone who wants a better Poland will show up. Some will say that it is a slogan, but everyone who has Poland in their heart should show that they believe and have the strength, Tusk said in a TV interview, according to The Guardian. Women’s rights, LGBTQ and the EU Several people news spoke to at Slottsplassen highlighted women’s rights, the EU and the right to abortion as reasons why they had attended. – We want women to have the right to decide whether they want to have a baby. The judiciary does not work as it should either, says Urszula Sapiezyńska, while waving an EU flag. People showed up with both the EU flag, the Ukrainian and the Polish flag in the capital on Sunday morning. Photo: KACPER PEMPEL / Reuters President Andrzej Duda has several times made hateful statements against LGBTQ people. Photo: Czarek Sokolowski / AP “Przemyśl for Tusk” is written on the heart. and signed by supporters of the former prime minister. Przemyśl is a town in southeast Poland. A man prepares an EU flag ahead of the support marking for the opposition. Photo: KACPER PEMPEL / Reuters Others, especially young people, had shown up because of LGBTQ rights, and used the rainbow flag as a cloak. In 2022, for the fourth year in a row, Poland was named the worst European country to live in for LGBTQ people. This is reported by the organization ILGA, which works to map and improve the situation of LGBTQ people in Europe. Poland is considered the worst country in the EU for LGBT people. President Duda calls homosexuality an ideology. Program director is Gry Blekastad Almås. It caused a great stir when Polish cities introduced “gay-free zones” in 2019, which at most covered a third of Poland. But after pressure from the EU, most regions chose to remove the label. President Duda and the governing Law and Order party (PiS) have done nothing to protect LGBTQ people, and have made several hateful statements on several occasions. In 2020, Duda said that “the LGBTQ ideology is more destructive than communism”, and ahead of the 2020 presidential election, he said that he will work to “protect children from LGBT people”, according to The Guardian. Andrzej Duda is a member of the Law and Justice party, and has been president of Poland since 2015. The party is known for being EU-sceptic, anti-Russian and nationalist. Photo: PETER CZIBORRA / Reuters Tusk, on the other hand, has promised to improve relations. He wants to make it easier for trans people to identify themselves, in addition to recognizing same-sex partnerships, according to Pink News. Undemocratic direction Law and justice has been criticized for steering Poland in an undemocratic direction. Earlier this year, Duda came up with a bill in which he wanted to make it legal to ban anyone who may have acted “under Russian interference” from public services. This drew criticism from, among others, the human rights organization Human Rights Watch and the EU. They argued that the amendment to the law can be misused to shut critics out of the state apparatus, and pointed out that the ruling party, Law and Justice, has previously blamed Tusk for having made lucrative gas agreements with Russia from 2014 to 2019, when he was president of the European Council .
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