Tens of thousands of people protested Friday evening (29) against a law virtually banning abortion in Poland. The protests took place in at least 35 cities, and in Warsaw there was a conflict with the police.
Promoted mainly by young people, the marches deliberately adopt aggressive slogans, such as “This is war”, “This witch will not be burned” and “Fuck it!”. According to the organizers of the protest movements, the aim is to show the right-wing conservatives who run the country that they have crossed the line.
Since coming to power in 2015, the Law and Justice (Pis) party has stepped up its discourse for the family and Catholic morality, attacked LGBT movements and increased its control over the press and justice.
The ban on abortion in cases of congenital malformation, which became law on Thursday at midnight (28), results from a decision of the Constitutional Court (equivalent to the Supreme Court of Brazil), in which 11 of the 12 judges have been appointed. by the ruling party. In addition, the president of the tribunal, Julia Przylebska, is part of the inner circle of the strongman of the country, Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
Put down by tear gas, protesters in Warsaw were trying to get to the street where Kaczynski lives, according to translator Marta, who took part in the marches and spoke with Folha via a messaging app on Friday at 10:30 p.m. (6:30 a.m. h in Brazil). With the city center blocked off by police, they played a “cat and mouse game,” she said.
They also tried to convince the police to back down in the crackdown, with war cries in which they asked them to listen to their mothers or apologize to their daughters. Police responded with loudspeaker messages, warning that protests were banned and asking participants to return home.
Polish TV channels showed the mayor of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski, participating in the protest. A center liberal, Trzaskowski was the ruling party’s main opponent in the 2020 presidential elections, in which a widely divided Poland re-elected PiS-backed President Andrzej Duda by minimal margin.
“Hopefully the PiS will eventually give in to this enormous pressure from most Poles and Poles, because there is no consent to such a shameful law,” he said live on social media.
The current abortion law has been passed by the majority of the population, and previous attempts to toughen it up have sparked protests in several Polish cities on several occasions.