How much will the abortion issue damage the Tusk government?

By Aleks Szczerbiak

The Polish governing coalition’s defeat in last month’s vote to decriminalise aiding abortions was a wasted opportunity to demonstrate its effectiveness on a highly contentious but symbolically important issue.

It contributed to a growing sense that the coalition came together solely to defeat its right-wing predecessor and contains a wide, often incompatible, range of views, especially on moral-cultural issues.

A hugely symbolic, but divisive issue

Last December, a new coalition government led by Donald Tusk, who had served as Polish prime minister between 2007-14 and then European Council president from 2014-19, was sworn in ending the eight-year rule of the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party.

Tusk is leader of the liberal-centrist Civic Platform (PO), which once again became the country’s main governing party.

The new coalition also includes the eclectic Third Way (Trzecia Droga) alliance – which itself comprises the agrarian-centrist Polish People’s Party (PSL) and the liberal-centrist Poland 2050 (Polska 2050) grouping formed to capitalise on TV personality-turned-politician Szymon Hołownia’s strong third place in the 2020 presidential election – and the smaller New Left (Nowa Lewica) party, the main component of a broader Left (Lewica) electoral alliance.

Many commentators felt that the huge protests against the Polish Constitutional Tribunal’s October 2020 ruling, that abortions on the grounds of severe birth defects are unconstitutional, played a key role in PiS’s defeat in last October’s parliamentary election.

Currently, abortion in Poland is only possible if the pregnancy seriously threatens the woman’s life or health, or when it is the result of rape or incest. As a consequence, the issue has assumed huge symbolic importance for many of the Tusk administration’s supporters, as one that mobilised large numbers of women and young people, to turn out and vote against PiS in the hope that a new government would liberalise the abortion law.

However, while there is a broad consensus within the ruling coalition that the tribunal’s October 2020 ruling should be reversed, there are deep divisions on what precise form that should take.

Both PO and The Left have proposed bills that would not only reverse the near-total ban but go even further liberalising the law to allow abortion, more-or-less on demand, up to the 12th week of pregnancy.

But the Third Way wants a return to the much more restrictive so-called abortion “compromise” that existed before the tribunal ruling, together with a national referendum on the issue.

PSL’s moderate social conservatism on moral-cultural issues reflects its predominantly rural and small-town electoral base, while Hołownia is a practising Catholic (albeit a very liberal one) who has expressed opposition to abortion on demand in the past. This is important because without the Third Way the governing coalition does not have enough parliamentary votes to secure liberalisation of the abortion law.

The sensitivity of the issue became apparent when, in March, Hołownia – who is speaker of the Sejm, the Polish parliament’s more powerful lower chamber – announced that work on legislation aimed at liberalising the abortion law would not begin until after the first round of voting in April’s local elections.

This led to the first major public row within the new governing camp. Hołownia argued that this was necessary to avoid the legislation becoming a victim of the ongoing local election campaign because, he claimed, if parliament proceeded with the various abortion bills before polling day there was a danger that both sides would feel under pressure to take tough positions and all of them would be rejected.

His announcement was, however, met with anger from The Left, which claimed that Hołownia was delaying the debate because some Third Way local election candidates, especially those standing for the PSL, were afraid of offending parish priests, who remain influential civil society actors in smaller towns and rural areas.

Sorry to interrupt your reading. The article continues below.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

A costly defeat

In the event, four draft laws proposed by the governing coalition parties aimed at ending the near-total abortion ban were all passed and forwarded to a specially created parliamentary commission.

As noted above, two of them, proposed by PO and The Left, would introduce abortion on demand up to the 12th week of pregnancy, while a third supported by the Third Way would return Poland to the pre-2020 situation.

A fourth proposal, seen as the least contentious, decriminalising aiding an abortion was passed by the commission and returned to the Sejm plenary in July. Under the current law, while terminating your own pregnancy is not a crime, those found guilty of performing or assisting unlawful abortions can face up to three years in prison.

However, in the Tusk government’s most significant political setback since it took office, the decriminalisation law was narrowly defeated by 218 to 215 in a vote that exposed the deep and bitter divisions within the ruling coalition over the abortion issue.

The defeat was made possible thanks to 24 PSL deputies, almost its entire parliamentary caucus, combining with the right-wing opposition in voting against the draft law (and one abstaining).

Earlier, Tusk made the mistake of raising the stakes on this issue with a post on X (formerly Twitter) in the week leading up to the vote, saying that pushing forward with and passing socially liberal legislation, including decriminalising aiding abortion, was central to the government’s vision of reform.

This made its defeat all the more costly politically. Indeed, embarrassingly for Tusk, three PO deputies failed to vote for the bill in violation of the party line. While one was later excused given that he was in hospital, the other two were suspended from its parliamentary caucus for three months.

Was abortion really a game-changer?

Some commentators and pro-abortion activists argue that the new government has to be seen to be delivering on this issue because it played such a crucial role in mobilising women and young people to turn out and vote for the governing parties in last October’s election.

Failing to do so would, they argue, make the government appear ineffective and lead to disillusionment among a key section of its support base. They also claim that there is overwhelming popular support for liberalisation of Poland’s abortion laws, including among a majority of Third Way, and even PSL, voters.

However, others argue that polling data suggesting widespread backing for liberalising the abortion law is misleading and depends a great deal on how the issue is framed, with support higher when questions avoid the concept of abortion on demand.

Moreover, while the controversial October 2020 Constitutional Tribunal ruling undoubtedly contributed to PiS’s initial slump in support, from which it never really recovered, it also coincided with a number of other crises.

The ruling came at the same time as PiS proposed an animal protection law that many Polish farmers, who constituted a key element of its rural-agricultural core electorate, felt threatened their livelihoods, and also coincided with a sense that the government was not coping effectively with the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic.

The socioeconomic fallout from the pandemic crisis and the war in Ukraine exacerbated Poles’ sense of insecurity. In other words, the abortion issue was not, on its own, a political game-changer.

At the same time, while there was certainly a massive increase in turnout among younger voters last October, many of whom would probably have been motivated by the abortion issue, electoral participation among women only increased by the same proportion as it did among men.

For its part, PSL argues that – because Poland is a nation with a strong Catholic heritage and Polish society is still rooted in traditional values – the government needs a strong conservative wing.

The ruling coalition only won last October’s election because, the party says, it secured the support of some socially conservative Poles who disliked PiS and were prepared to support the Third Way but would not have voted for PO or The Left if they were the only alternatives.

Some commentators also argue that PSL felt that it was increasingly being sidelined within the government and needed to assert itself.

No change even with a new president?

Moreover, PSL also argues that it is a waste of time passing laws aimed at increasing access to abortion when PiS-backed President Andrzej Duda has made it clear he will strike them down, and the governing coalition lacks the three-fifths parliamentary majority required to override his veto.

He could also refer them to the Constitutional Tribunal before they come into effect which, given its current composition, would also almost certainly overturn them.

On the other hand, some government supporters argue that such a veto would ensure the prominence of the abortion issue, and provide a rallying point for socially liberal voters to turn out and vote for an anti-PiS candidate, in next summer’s presidential election, particularly given that the apparent wave of enthusiasm that brought the government to office has already started to wane.

However, this assumes that the ruling coalition can get as far as passing a law through parliament for Duda to veto. If it cannot, then the imperative for these voters to turn out would be greatly reduced.

A return to the pre-2020 abortion law proposed by the Third Way is one possibility that could even secure the support of some PiS deputies. But there are grave doubts as to whether The Left, or even PO, would support this. They argue that the “compromise” law was already one of the strictest in Europe and would not go far enough in protecting what they argue are fundamental women’s reproductive rights.

So it may be that there will not be any decisive solution to the issue unless and until a candidate supported by the governing coalition wins next year’s presidential election.

In fact, as even Tusk appeared to acknowledge, given that the (apparently least contentious) decriminalisation proposal fell at the parliamentary hurdle, it looks increasingly unlikely that, even with a change of president, the abortion law will be amended by the current legislature.

An inherently unstable coalition?

The government was fortunate that all of this occurred during the summer, when most Poles are focused on their holidays and not politics. It has several months to make up the ground before the presidential election, and until September, when parliament returns, to come up with a solution to this particular problem.

Left-wing lawmakers, who originally drafted the decriminalisation law, have vowed to resubmit it repeatedly until it is passed. However, the chances of this appear slim: it will require either a (very unlikely) change of heart by the PSL or another lucky coincidence of absenteeism by opposition deputies (14 PiS lawmakers missed July’s vote, assuming they had no chance of winning) that might allow the law to slip through.

So the governing coalition’s defeat in the July abortion vote was a wasted opportunity to demonstrate its effectiveness on a highly contentious but symbolically important issue. It contributed to a growing perception that the ruling coalition only came together to defeat PiS and contains a wide, often incompatible, range of ideological views, especially on moral-cultural issues.

The vote not only precipitated a major row that undermined the show of unity that facilitated the ruling parties’ election victory but called into question the government’s overall competence and highlighted the inherently precarious nature of its parliamentary majority.

By exposing a lack of effectiveness in implementing coalition discipline, the vote raised questions as to whether the government can ensure a working parliamentary majority capable of fulfilling its election promises and driving through its programme of key social reforms.

Indeed, it faces further potential defeats on moral-cultural issues – such as a draft law introducing same-sex civil partnerships, another signature issue of the Polish liberal-left – if enough PSL deputies once again vote against.

Main image credit: Kuba Atys / Agencja Wyborcza.pl

Aleks Szczerbiak is Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex. The original version of this article appeared here.