PiS ambivalence

Right after the violence in Bialystok, Education Minister Dariusz Piontkowski, a PiS lawmaker, told local media “the equality parades are causing an enormous resistance. Because of that, it is worth deciding whether in future such parades should be organised at all”.

PiS members have come out strongly against LGBT rights in recent months, especially in the run-up to European Parliament elections in May. They argue that the LGBT movement is an imported ideology that threatens the Polish nation.

PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski has famously warned: “Hands off our children!” And across the country, PiS councilors have pushed for declarations stating that towns are “free of LGBT ideology”.

In July, Polish daily Gazeta Polska, seen as friendly to the government, announced it would include “LGBT-free zone” stickers with its paper, an initiative applauded by other conservative media. (It distributed the stickers during the second half of the month before a court ordered them to be withdrawn from sale).

As police announced arrests following the Bialystok march, PiS leaders started distancing the party from the violence.

Prime Minister Morawiecki condemned “the hooligan, aggressive behaviour” and Interior Minister Elzbieta Witek said that “in Poland there is no consent for conduct that harms the rights of other people”.

Certainly not everyone in the governing party has extremist views, but the party is trying to play two pianos at the same time. We’ll have to see if they can put the genie they unleashed back in the bottle.

But critics say PiS’ anti-LGBT rhetoric has emboldened individuals and groups to act on their homophobic impulses.

“In 2015, during the campaign for general elections, for the first time in recent Polish history, the hostility towards an imagined enemy group entered the mainstream — and stayed there — which of course legitimises the far right,” said Rafal Pankowski, a Polish sociologist who leads the anti-racist organisation Never Again.

“The targets vary and are interchangeable: in 2015, different right-wing and far-right groups were competing over who is more radical in anti-migrant, anti-Muslim and anti-refugee positions. In 2018, it was about the Jews. Now, it is about LGBT people.”

Pankowski thinks a key player in this shift was musician-turned-politician Pawel Kukiz, whose Kukiz’15 movement positioned itself to the right of PiS in 2015 general elections, much as the far-right Jobbik party in Hungary has tried to outflank that country’s ruling Fidesz party.

To compete, PiS “started saying things that the far-right had been saying”, Pankowski said.

In the run-up to general elections set for this autumn, analysts say a far-right alliance known as Konfederacja is playing a similar role in making PiS more radical. Konfederacja polled well in the run-up to the EU elections but failed to make the five per cent threshold to win any seats.

Janusz Korwin-Mikke, a far-right politician from Konfederacja, told Rzeczpospolita newspaper this week that “if the homo propaganda is happening, there will be pogroms”. He continued: “It was already happening in Bialystok, but this is a foretaste of what will happen.”

Pankowski said a fundamental shift towards hate speech in public discourse was a boon to the far right.

“Certainly not everyone in the governing party has extremist views, but the party is trying to play two pianos at the same time,” he said. “We’ll have to see if they can put the genie they unleashed back in the bottle.”

Witkowski, the journalist who was attacked after complaining about homophobic grafitti, said that while the right wing of PiS may hold extremist views sincerely, most party members are more cynical in their support for the anti-LGBT cause.

“They know that family, religion and the nation are the last things left for free in a capitalist society where people feel threatened and precarious all the time,” he said.

“The government, then, is simply shaping the flow of fear in society and channeling it in the direction they want, making people believe this is the problem, when the things that actually change people’s lives are elsewhere: the prices of commodities, taxes, retirement age.

“The far-right, the nationalists, neo-fascists and others, they are like bull terriers on a leash. They are self-made crusaders for Christianity or for the nation. They are not formally connected to the government. But the government does give them a description of reality, which they act upon.”