Donald Tusk woos female voters ahead of Poland’s election

Poland’s opposition leader Donald Tusk has made a last-ditch attempt to win over female voters ahead of Sunday’s election, including a pledge to restore reproductive rights curtailed by the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party. Addressing a mostly female audience in the city of Łódź, where women textile workers were at the forefront of the country’s industrial revolution, Tusk emphasized their potentially pivotal role in ousting PiS after eight years in power. For women wanting to live in a modern European country, “it really can’t be like this!”, he shouted to loud applause at a rally this week. Ahead of what is shaping up to be one of Poland’s most polarised elections, Tusk’s conservative-leaning but more liberal Civic Platform is trailing PiS by some five percentage points. The opposition hopes to reverse the result of the 2019 election when 43 percent of the female vote went for PiS and just 30 percent for Civic Platform. Absenteeism may make matters worse: internal surveys show about half of the younger female electorate — aged between 18 and 45 — might not vote at all on Sunday.

“This a real problem because I’m sure these [younger] women, if they decide to vote, will defend democracy and the rights of women,” Hanna Zdanowska, the Civic Platform mayor of Łódź, told the Financial Times. As part of its eleventh-hour effort to mobilise female voters, Civic Platform is promising that one of the first laws passed by a new Tusk government would subsidise in vitro fertilisation — for which the PiS government stopped public financing only weeks after taking office in 2015. “Every party has said or done things that I really don’t like,” said start-up entrepreneur Olivia Kowalczyk, 25. Civic Platform is “now talking about women’s rights but we all know they made many promises in the past that they then absolutely didn’t fulfil when they were in power eight years ago”. By comparison, only about one-third of male voters in the same age group are on the fence about casting their ballots on Sunday, internal polling shows. Young men have now also become the core electorate of a far-right misogynist party, Confederation, that could offer PiS its only path back to power.

Women have spearheaded the pushback against PiS and led mass street protests following a 2020 constitutional court ruling rolling back the right to abortion. But Civic Platform is also campaigning on reproductive rights issues — which are particularly divisive in a majority-Catholic society. Poland has a proportional representation system and Sunday’s election result will also depend on any swing in turnout between voters in Warsaw and other cities dominated by the opposition and older rural voters who embrace the conservatism of PiS and also rely more on state handouts. Łódź is a case in point, a city in the centre of Poland led by mayor Zdanowska since 2010. But the outskirts of Łódź provide more fertile ground for PiS. Many towns are run by conservative women who canvass door-to-door for PiS and often also against feminism. “I don’t go to the centre of Łódź to campaign but I’m spending time with my people, reading poetry to disabled children in our schools,” said Renata Kobiera, a PiS candidate in Brzeziny, which has 12,000 residents. Her municipality office is decorated with posters celebrating small-scale PiS infrastructure projects, such as a new bus line. “I think women here will vote for women like me because we calm down our politics,” Kobiera argued.

The opposition’s last-minute drive to attract younger women seems to mobilise older women to vote for PiS, said Marcin Duma, head of pollster Ibris, though he added it was hard to determine to what extent. The highest-ranked woman on the PiS list in Łódź, Agnieszka Wojciechowska van Heukelom, claimed Tusk was belatedly and unjustifiably moving women’s rights up his agenda. “I don’t see the collapse of women’s rights that Donald Tusk is now trying to talk about, and I know many other women who don’t see it either,” she said. Sunday’s result “will not be determined by talking about women’s rights but by people, especially women, who want to feel safe in every sense of the term, not only military security but also social safety, with strong support from the state”, the conservative candidate said. Tusk has at times struggled to deliver a consistent message to progressive women. He spoke forcefully about women’s rights in Łódź, a day after taking part in a televised debate in which he did not mention women at all. Only one of the six participants in that debate talked about women, Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus from the Left party, who also happened to be the only woman on stage.

Tusk also recently stunned many supporters by nominating a former ultraconservative education minister, Roman Giertych, to run in the constituency where PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczyński is standing. Giertych’s political return could deal a blow to Kaczyński, but it could also upset those who recall his demand for schoolchildren to be taught that abortion is murder. Opposition candidate Aleksandra Wiśniewska, 29, argued Tusk was not given a chance to speak about women during Monday’s TV debate because the discussion was steered by presenters from the pro-PiS state broadcaster. “Women’s rights are absolutely critical,” she said. “But I think there is something far more pivotal and sinister hanging over this election, which is that our democracy is at stake.”