Majority of Poles support abortion protests and popularity of ruling party has dropped, polls show

A large majority of people in Poland are opposed to last week’s constitutional court ruling that introduces a near total ban on abortion, and most support the mass protests that have emerged in response to it, according to polls.

Meanwhile, the ruling national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party – which is regarded as being behind the court’s decision – has also seen its support decline in polling.

Strong opposition to constitutional court ruling

On 22 October, the Constitutional Tribunal found that abortions in cases where the foetus has serious and irreversible birth defects are unconstitutional.

Given that these make up around 98% of all legal terminations in Poland, the ruling appears to necessitate a near-total ban on abortion. However, the president, Andrzej Duda, has proposed a slightly less strict “compromise” bill to implement the court’s decision.

This week, a series of opinion polls found that most Poles are opposed to the tribunal’s ruling. The proportions expressing a negative opinion were 71% (SW research poll for Rzeczpospolita), 66% (IBRiS for Onet), and 73% (Kantar for Gazeta Wyborcza). Only 13%, 25% and 13% held favourable views of the ruling in the same polls.

A further survey by Estymator for Do Rzeczy – which, unlike the others, excluded those who do not express an opinion from its results – found 79% assessing the court’s decision negatively and only 21% positively.

Support for existing abortion law

Three of those polls also asked for respondents’ views on regulation of abortion. Estymator found that a majority (67%) favour maintaining the existing law, which allows termination in only three cases: if the pregnancy threatens the mother’s life or health; if it is the result of a criminal act; or if a birth defect is diagnosed.

Only 14% wanted further restriction of the law (as both the Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling and the president’s proposed compromise would do), while 19% want it to be liberalised.

Kantar’s poll found a similar result, though with a differently phrased question. Most (62%) said that abortion should be “legal in specific cases” (as it currently is), 22% wanted it to be available on demand up to the 12th week of pregnancy, while 11% want it banned completely.

Both of those results differ somewhat from previous polling, which has usually found stronger support (between 30-40%) for liberalisation of the existing abortion law.

In its poll, IBRiS asked whether respondents want a national referendum to decide on the form of the abortion law: 69% were in favour of the idea, with only 24% opposed. The leader of the Polish People’s Party (PSL), an opposition group, has proposed holding such a referendum to resolve the current crisis.

Majority back the protests

The tribunal’s ruling has triggered eleven consecutive days of mass protests around Poland. They are believed to be the largest demonstrations the country has seen since the fall of communism in 1989.

The protests have shown no sign of diminishing. Police reported that Friday’s gathering in Warsaw – attended by around 100,000 people – was the biggest so far.

Although the ruling party has sought to portray the protesters as violent radicals, three polls have this week found that a majority of the public support them: 56% in Estymator’s poll, 54% in Kantar’s, and 64% in a survey by IBP for Super Express. The same polls found 38%, 43% and 33% saying that they do not support the protests.

Kantar also broke down its results by gender, finding that there was in fact stronger support for the protests among men (54% of whom supported them with 41% opposed) than women (for whom the respective figures were 51% and 46%).

The same poll also asked people whether they think that the “protests have a chance of actually changing something and preventing the introduction of new [abortion] regulations”. Only 32% agreed, with 56% believing that the government will sooner or later go ahead with tightening the law regardless.

Declining popularity of ruling party

While the abortion ruling was officially made by an independent court, many believe that in practice it originated from PiS. The party has since 2016 exerted influence over the Constitutional Tribunal, and its leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, is a close personal associate of the court’s president, Julia Przyłębska.

In SW Research’s poll, 63% of respondents expressed the view that the PiS-led ruling coalition influenced the tribunal’s ruling; only 17% thought that it did not.

The issue also appears to have had a negative impact on support for the ruling party, which has been in power since 2015 and has won each of the six elections – presidential, parliamentary, European and local – held since that year.

Until late October, PiS had been polling at around 38%. That made it by far the most popular party, ahead of the centrist Civic Coalition (KO), which was on around 27%.

On Wednesday, however, Kantar found that support for PiS had suddenly dropped to 26% – a decline of 10 percentage points since the last Kantar poll and the party’s lowest figure since 2015, reports Gazeta Wyborcza.

That was followed on Friday by pollster CBOS also recording a 10 percentage point drop for PiS, to 31%. This weekend, Estymator had PiS at 33% (down over 6 percentage points) and IBRiS at 29% (down 8 percentage points).

KO’s level of support remains similar to before, but there has been a rise in the polls for Poland 2050 (Polska 2050) – a movement set up by independent presidential candidate Szymon Hołownia – and a smaller one for The Left (Lewica), which has been active in supporting the current protests.

There are currently no elections scheduled for the next three years, until a parliamentary election in autumn 2023. The only way that could be brought forward is if the ruling coalition collapsed or decided to call a snap vote.

In September, the government did come close to falling apart, due to internal rivalries as well as disagreement over legislation on animal rights and granting legal immunity to officials who broke the law in order to tackle the pandemic. Those differences were, however, resolved and a reshuffled cabinet was announced at the end of that month.

There are already signs of division within the ruling camp over the abortion issue. PiS’s more moderate junior coalition partner, Agreement (Porozumienie), has pushed for a compromise along the lines suggested by President Duda.

PiS’s other junior partner, the more hard-line United Poland (Solidarna Polska), is believed to favour a stricter implementation of the Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling. PiS itself, by far the largest of the three parties, is reported to be internally divided over the issue.

Main image credit: Maciek Jazwiecki / Agencja Gazeta

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.