Pro-choice supporters hold biggest-ever protest
against Polish government
About 100,00o people take to the streets of Warsaw to
oppose tightened abortion law
Christian
Davies in Warsaw
@crsdavies
Fri 30 Oct
2020 22.15 GMTLast modified on Fri 30 Oct 2020 22.53 GMT
About one
hundred thousand protesters took to the streets of the Polish capital, Warsaw,
on Friday, in the largest demonstration of popular anger directed against
Poland’s ruling rightwing Law and Justice party (PiS) since it assumed office
in 2015.
Protests
have been held across the country since Poland’s constitutional tribunal
declared earlier this month that abortions in instances where a foetus is
diagnosed with a serious and irreversible birth defect were unconstitutional.
Such procedures constitute about 96% of legal abortions in Poland, which
already has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe.
On
Wednesday, pro-choice activists called a “women’s strike” that attracted over
400,000 people to protests in over 400 towns and cities across the central
European nation.
Just hours
before Friday’s protest, Andrzej Duda, Poland’s right-wing president, announced
what he described as a “legislative solution” to the political crisis,
proposing that terminations in instances where birth defects are terminal would
be allowed. Terminations of foetuses with conditions such as Down’s syndrome
would be banned, however.
Strongly
criticised by Poland’s medical and legal establishments, Duda’s intervention
did little to quell the anger that has left the government and its de facto
leader, PiS founder Jarosław Kaczyński, reeling.
On Friday,
tens of thousands of protesters gathered at points across the city, chanting “I
think, I feel, I decide” and anti-PiS slogans.
The
protests, held as the government introduces ever-stricter restrictions in
response to a sharp rise in coronavirus infections and fatalities in recent
weeks, have been characterised by humorous slogans and placards and the
engagement of Poles in their teens and early 20s.
But there
were also violent incidents, as bands of nationalists dressed in black attacked
protesters on the streets of central Warsaw. According to the Polish police,
several of those arrested were carrying knives and batons.
Earlier
this week, Kaczyński made an address to the nation calling on his supporters to
defend churches from the protests, after services were disrupted and in some
instances churches defaced during protests last weekend. Some have blamed the
PiS leader for implicitly encouraging far-right groups to attack protesters.
On Friday
night, having gathered in the centre of Warsaw, tens of thousands of protesters
marched north to the leafy suburb where Kaczyński lives, only to be blocked off
by hundreds of riot police.
“I just
spoke to a young woman who told me that she is 24, and that she has done
nothing for the last six days except protest,” Maja Wojcikowska, one of the
protest’s organisers, told broadcaster TVN. “There is an incredible energy, we
are not going to waste it.”
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