Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

The Populist War on Women

Sławomir Sierakowski 27th October 2016

SlAWOMIR SIERAKOWSKI

Sławomir Sierakowski

Jarosław Kaczyński and Donald Trump, two politicians who have shocked the world this past year, have mostly gotten away with their outrages. But not anymore.

When Kaczyński’s Law and Justice (PiS) party came to power last year, it immediately seized control over key Polish institutions, including the Constitutional Tribunal, the state prosecutor’s office, public media and enterprises, even state-owned horse stables. Because the PiS government inherited a sound economy and strong fiscal position, Kaczyński hasn’t seen the need for a finance minister, so the post was recently liquidated.

Trump, too, has been engaging in behavior that under normal circumstances would be politically disqualifying: attacking the parents of a Muslim-American soldier killed in combat, mocking a disabled reporter, and impugning Senator John McCain for being captured during the Vietnam War (he was held and tortured for more than five years). Everyone was outraged, except for Trump’s voters.

This state of affairs might have continued. But both Kaczyński and Trump have recently been confronted by a political force that neither reckoned with: women.

Before last year’s parliamentary election in Poland, the far-right organization Ordo Iuris had proposed a blanket ban on abortion, one that would go beyond Poland’s current legislation, already among the most restrictive in Europe, by forcing women to give birth even in cases of rape, incest, health risks, and serious fetal defects. But, at the same time, another legislative proposal was put forward to liberalize abortion laws, introduce sex education into schools, and guarantee insurance coverage of contraceptives.

Although PiS solemnly promised that the Sejm (parliament) would not reject the latter bill in the first reading, the legislation criminalizing abortion was advanced to a parliamentary vote, and the pro-choice proposition was rejected. Women spontaneously took to the streets en masse.

For nearly two decades, Poles believed that the country’s abortion laws could not be changed, owing to the power of the Catholic Church and the subordination of the political class to religious authorities. But the actress Krystyna Janda, who starred in Andrzej Wajda’s film Man of Iron, called on Polish women to launch a general strike. On October 3, instead of going to work, women across the country turned out to protest, following a model established by Iceland’s women in 1975, when 90% did not go to work and effectively paralyzed the country.

The demonstrations occurred even in small towns, and despite dismal weather. Women also congregated outside PiS headquarters, the true seat of power in Polish politics. In solidarity with Polish women, women from Kenya to Berlin took to the streets dressed in black.

For the first time since PiS’s return to power last year, Kaczyński was frightened. The next day, he had his party vote to reject the anti-abortion proposal. Never before had he acted in a similar manner.

In the United States, Trump’s presidential campaign began to crumble only when it was revealed that he boasted about sexually assaulting women. Soon, women who had endured his attacks began to come forward and describe what had happened to them.

Trump’s spell was broken. Independent voters – and many Republicans – bolted. Michelle Obama delivered an emotional address about how Trump’s behavior had shaken her, speaking in a way that Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, cannot because of the complicated history of her own marriage. Support for Trump, particularly among suburban women, crashed. According to recent polls, his backing from women plummeted from 39% to 29% over the course of a couple of days.

And yet neither Trump nor Kaczyński seems willing – or perhaps able – to reverse course. After withdrawing his support for the Ordo Iuris proposal, Kaczyński couldn’t leave the issue alone. “We will strive to ensure that even pregnancies that are very difficult, when the child is doomed to die or is seriously deformed, are brought to term so that the child can be baptized, buried, and given a name,” he announced on October 13. Women held another general strike on October 24.

Perhaps Kaczyński has always been inclined to self-destruction. As Prime Minister in 2007, he handed power to his opponents on a silver platter, by attacking his coalition partner, the Samoobrona party, and calling for an early election. Once again, it appears that Kaczyński is his own greatest nemesis.

This time, Kaczyński (who holds no official government position) first united the political mainstream (whom he dubbed “the worst sort” of Poles) against him by attacking liberal democracy. Now, by pressing his war on women, who form a majority in Poland, he has united the mainstream with the left and politicized and galvanized the country’s youth. Immediately after Kaczyński’s latest comments, women began to gather in front of his house, warning him: “You want to peer into our beds? We’ll peer into your home.”

According to an opinion poll by the newspaper Rzeczpospolita, 69% of Poles support the so-called black protest that women have mounted. If the October 24 strike is larger than the spontaneous demonstrations of October 3, support for PiS will surely drop significantly for the first time since it assumed power, and Poland will find itself in a new political situation.

Trump, too, has doubled down on sexism, blaming the media for his travails and calling one of his accusers “that horrible woman,” adding, “Believe me, she would not be my first choice.” And, appealing directly to his many white-supremacist supporters among the so-called alt-right, he has also begun indulging a classic anti-Semitic trope, accusing Clinton of meeting “in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers.”

But Americans aren’t buying it; nor are Poles. And it is only fitting that Trump, and possibly Kaczyński, will be defeated by those whose dignity and equality each refuses to recognize, with women in the lead.

Copyright: Project Syndicate 2016 Populist War on Women

Sławomir Sierakowski

Sławomir Sierakowski is founder of the Krytyka Polityczna movement and Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Warsaw.

You are here: Home / Politics / The Populist War on Women

Most Popular Posts

Visentini,ITUC,Qatar,Fight Impunity,50,000 Visentini, ‘Fight Impunity’, the ITUC and QatarFrank Hoffer
Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse
income inequality,inequality,Gini,1 per cent,elephant chart,elephant Global income inequality: time to revise the elephantBranko Milanovic

Most Recent Posts

transition,deindustrialisation,degradation,environment Europe’s industry and the ecological transitionCharlotte Bez and Lorenzo Feltrin
central and eastern Europe,unions,recognition Social dialogue in central and eastern EuropeMartin Myant
women soldiers,Ukraine Ukraine war: attitudes changing to women soldiersJennifer Mathers and Anna Kvit
military secrets,World Trade Organization,WTO,NATO,intellectual-property rights Military secrets and the World Trade OrganizationUgo Pagano
energy transition,Europe,wind and solar Europe’s energy transition starts to speed upDave Jones

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

Social policy in the European Union: state of play 2022

Since 2000, the annual Bilan social volume has been analysing the state of play of social policy in the European Union during the preceding year, the better to forecast developments in the new one. Co-produced by the European Social Observatory (OSE) and the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), the new edition is no exception. In the context of multiple crises, the authors find that social policies gained in ambition in 2022. At the same time, the new EU economic framework, expected for 2023, should be made compatible with achieving the EU’s social and ‘green’ objectives. Finally, they raise the question whether the EU Social Imbalances Procedure and Open Strategic Autonomy paradigm could provide windows of opportunity to sustain the EU’s social ambition in the long run.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Discover the new FEPS Progressive Yearbook and what 2023 has in store for us!

The Progressive Yearbook focuses on transversal European issues that have left a mark on 2022, delivering insightful future-oriented analysis for the new year. It counts on renowned authors' contributions, including academics, politicians and analysts. This fourth edition is published in a time of war and, therefore, it mostly looks at the conflict itself, the actors involved and the implications for Europe.


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube