PiS’s Biopolitical Sovereignty vis-à-vis Brussels’ ‘Gender Ideology’: The LGBTIQ Issue on the Eve of the 2023 Polish General Election

ABSTRACT

On the eve of the 2023 Polish general election, the conflict between the incumbent PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość – Law and Justice) party and the European Union on the LGBTIQ issue can be framed as a clash of two biopolitical projects – the EU’s (which follows democratic principles and refers to LGBTIQ rights as human rights) and Poland’s (which accepts the EU’s paradigm of human rights but tries to establish its own biopolitical vision of the LGBTIQ community) – that went through four stages. At each stage, PiS created new zones of biopolitical exclusion: normative, in a kind of ‘biopolitical conservatism’; spatial, as in the case of the establishment of ‘LGBT-free zones’; and legislative, such as issuing the Charters of Family Rights and opening court cases against the LGBTIQ community. The ‘battle’ between Brussels and Warsaw, which resulted in the adoption of the European Commission-Poland Partnership Agreement 2021-27, can be a demonstration of the power of the EU against illiberal backlashes. Yet this ‘war’ is hardly close to an end. Brussels’ criticism of PiS’s anti-LGBTIQ policy has not led the incumbent party to abandon its anti-LGBTIQ agenda during the election campaign but has rather brought nuance to it.

KEYWORDS:

• biopopulism
• Poland
• LGBTIQ
• biopolitical sovereignty
• spaces of exception

Acknowledgments

This article is supported by the I-Site grant “Les Chemins vers la Modernisation en Europe Centrale et Orientale” (IRHiS -CNRS 8529, University of Lille) (2021-2024). The author expresses her gratitude to the anonymous reviewers, whose comments helped to improve the key arguments in the article. Any opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding organisations.

Notes

1 Throughout this article, I use the acronym “LGBTIQ” in my own writing (in accordance with the approach of the European Commission [2020, 1]), while following the original source when citing or referring to other documents or statements.

2 On 10 October 2019, the Polish National Television (TVP) broadcasted a film titled Invasion. The Polish LGBTIQ rights organisation Campaign Against Homophobia (KPH) considered the footage inciting hatred against the Polish LGBTIQ community, violating its dignity and associating it with paedophilia. The KPH filed a lawsuit against TVP in 2019 and won it in 2022.

3 I applied elements of critical discourse analysis (CDA) as exemplified by its Foucauldian tradition (Wodak and Meyer 2001, 18, 121–38). I follow Norman Fairclough’s (2010) idea that a “primary focus of CDA is on the effect of power relations and inequalities in producing social wrongs, and in particular on discursive aspects of power relations and inequalities: on dialectical relations between discourse and power, and their effects on other relations within the social process and their elements” (20). I also share Ruth Wodak’s notion on the importance of analysing social context as part of CDA, including fieldwork and ethnography (Wodak and Meyer 2001, 24).

4 The selection procedure consisted of two stages. The first stage included sampling all the articles published by TVP Info and Do Rzeczy from February 2022 to March 2023, which contained the words/hashtags: ‘LGBT’, ‘LGBTIQ’ and ‘equality parade’ (‘parada równości’). The second stage included the selection (within the resulting sample) of op-eds and news focusing on Poland. Through this method, I selected 21 articles published by TVP Info and 341 articles published by Do Rzeczy. An analysis of the selected articles focused on (i) the topic of discussion with reference to the LGBTIQ issue; (ii) the speakers (PiS members and its allies, civil society, the Polish Catholic Church, EU politicians, LGBTIQ activists); (iii) the metaphors used for describing the LGBTIQ community and its practices; (iv) the framing of the LGBTIQ community as a part of the Polish society. Furthermore, materials from two liberal media, OKO.press and Polytika, were analysed to better understand the arguments of PiS’s opponents.

5 For more about the conditionality for the protection of the EU budget, see Kölling (2022).

6 Since January 2021, Poland has one of the strictest abortion laws in Europe, which allows terminating pregnancy only in the case of real threats to women’s life and health or due to illegal acts, such as rape or incest. In October 2020, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled the termination of pregnancy due to serious defects of the fetus (which made up 98 percentof all legal terminations in the country) unconstitutional (Wilczek 2020).

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Alexandra Yatsyk

Alexandra Yatsyk is a Visiting Researcher at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia, a Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Institut de Recherches Historiques du Septentrion (IRHIS) of the Université de Lille, Lille, France, and a Lecturer at Sciences Po, France.