Poland's Rulers Made Up a ‘Rainbow Plague’

I am sorry to say that these conversations were also echoed by a large part of the Catholic Church hierarchy, from parish priests who put Duda’s election posters outside their churches to the archbishop of Krakow—one of Pope John Paul II’s successors in that job—who has spoken of homosexuals as “the rainbow plague.” This rhetoric is not dog whistling, as American political commentators like to say: This is open demonization, an all-out culture war.

Both Duda and state television played some other ugly games in the final weeks of the campaign, delivering a shout-out to anti-vaccination fanatics and accusing Trzaskowski of serving German and “Jewish” interests (one chyron on state TV read: “Will Trzaskowski Fulfill Jewish Demands?”). My husband, who is Polish and a member of the European Parliament for Trzaskowski’s party, campaigned on the Warsaw mayor’s behalf. Several times, voters told him they wouldn’t take his leaflets, because if he opposed the government then he must be German. “But I don’t even speak German,” he responded, in Polish. It didn’t seem to matter. At the end of the campaign, the Law and Justice leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, declared that Trzaskowski did not have a “Polish heart” or a “Polish soul.”

Poland is an ethnically homogeneous country, monolingual and overwhelmingly Catholic. Nevertheless, Law and Justice propagandists have, over the past decade, successfully manufactured, cultivated, and promoted a tribal division that is every bit as powerful as those that are based on skin color or language. While neither Germanophobia nor anti-Semitism was part of mainstream politics before Law and Justice took over the government in 2015, both sentiments have historical precedent. But suspicion of LGBTQ people is a brand-new political issue in Poland. The fear of the “rainbow plague” has been created from scratch, ginned up by cynical propagandists who know perfectly well how nasty it is. Now that Duda has won, they will tone it down, even pivot away. At an election-night celebration, Kinga Duda, the president’s daughter, made a speech that already seemed designed to alleviate the anger and ill will created by her father’s campaign. Much in the way that Ivanka Trump is sometimes used to soften her father’s image, the younger Duda earnestly expressed the wish that “no one in our country should be afraid to leave home,” regardless of “what we believe, what color skin we have, what views we have, what candidate we support, and who we love.”

This was pure spin, but it’s true that Duda will not spend the next five years of his presidency beating up gay people (though of course some of his supporters might, albeit unofficially). Instead, the members of his party will turn to the things that really interest them, which have nothing to do with “family values” at all. Their first priority, as some declared on election night, is to take control of the independent media, which is still large, encompassing one major independent television station as well as several newspaper groups and websites. Some of these have foreign ownership, or partial foreign ownership, which helps explain why they have remained free of government influence until now. Whereas Polish businessmen linked to opposition politics or the independent media are subject to various kinds of harassment—tax inspections, fake corruption investigations—foreigners are harder to control. Now the ruling party plans to use their “foreignness” as an excuse to force them to sell. That’s why they speak of “Polonization” of the media rather than “nationalization,” though of course they amount to the same thing. A draft law has already been prepared.