For LGBTQ+ people in Poland, the past eight years under the Law and Justice party (PiS) have been a period of turmoil and a test of endurance. Now that PiS is on its way out after last month’s elections – it was ousted by an opposition alliance led by Donald Tusk – there is a sense of hope on the horizon. So how have government and public attitudes on this issue changed in recent years, and what needs to be done now?
The LGBTQ+ community in Poland remains the least legally protected in the EU. The PiS government made homophobia a central electoral theme ever since it first had to defend its hold on power in 2018. Throughout local, EU and general elections, queer communities were consistently scapegoated by the ruling party and portrayed as an internal enemy. In 2020, Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, who was fighting for re-election, infamously claimed that “LGBT is not people, it’s an ideology”, which threatened the nation and was worse than communism. This kind of publicly sanctioned symbolic violence was echoed by several Law and Justice-controlled local authorities, which declared themselves “LGBT-free zones”, sparking outrage from civil society and international institutions and news media.
