The Story of Poland and its Recently Re-elected President Andrzej Duda
Rohin Buch
Health Head
Since the beginning of the post-colonial era, which was in the late 1900s with the crumbling of the British Empire, Europe has been plunged into a nationalistic crisis in which the far-right chooses to embrace a romantic nationalism—meaning that they alienate the minorities in their country and support the ethnic majority. This tactic or ideology has seen a rise in the 2000s with many leaders throughout Europe succumbing to it. These leaders are, namely, France's LePen family and their National Front party, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, Austria’s Jörg Haider, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and finally, the man who will be discussed today, Poland’s Andrzej Duda.
Duda has been known for his notorious anti-LGBT and anti-immigrant rhetoric, views he shares with his counterparts. An infamous comment heard at one point during his campaign was that “LGBT are not people; they are an ideology” and that this ideology is “even more destructive than communism”. Duda’s re-election in which he narrowly beat out Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, a liberal and a supporter of LGBT rights in Poland, proves that the romantic nationalism of the far-right is both dreaded and prevalent in Europe to this day.
Furthermore, in Duda’s anti-LGBT rhetoric, during the time of his re-election campaign, he used state-run TV to propagate campaign videos which were meant to belittle Trzaskowski. These videos baselessly accused him of the “sexualization of children” and the destruction of the family, all secretly veiled remarks at Trsazkowski’s pro-LGBT views, while also speculating that he would force LGBTQ education to be taught in Polish schools and entirely replace independence parades with pride parades. Furthermore, Duda promised while campaigning that if elected he would ban LGBT education in schools and proposed to change the constitution which would ban LGBT couples from adopting children. These campaign videos, while being completely false and baseless, were successful in turning many Polish people against Trzaskowski. During this period much of Duda’s rhetoric was also used by the Catholic Church, shown clearly by Polish parish priests’ posting Duda’s election posters on their church doors and the archbishop of Warsaw’s remark that equated homosexuals to what he called the “rainbow plague”.
Before discussing the rest of Andrzej Duda’s xenophobic rhetoric it is essential to consider Poland’s ethnic context. Poland is a country dominated by a Catholic and ethnic Polish majority, leading to a very close-minded approach to politics and anything seemingly deviating from this majority. However, the party to which Andrzej Duda belongs called Law and Justice, or in Polish, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, have, over the last decade, increasingly fueled the fire of racism with their nationalist and ethnic propaganda, feeding the Polish people Germanophobic and anti-Semitic ideals.
In the last few weeks of campaigning ahead of the July 12th election day, Duda and the government-controlled TV slapped even more allegations on Trzaskowski, accusing him of being in league with Germans and Jews, two groups who have been ingrained to be enemies of the state in the eyes of the Polish people, as mentioned previously.
It is now our duty as global citizens to prevent more of the European far-right politicians from being elected to high office and undoing decades of hard work.
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