Poland’s Rulers Made Up a ‘Rainbow Plague’
The president and his party ginned up fear of LGBTQ people—and rode that strategy to reelection.
Rare is the election campaign that truly hinges on a single issue. But in the run-up to Sunday’s presidential election in Poland, “LGBT”—an English acronym that sounds strange and foreign in Polish—was unquestionably the dominant theme. The coronavirus pandemic is still ravaging the world, an economic crisis looms, and international politics are in turmoil. Yet when the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, declared that “LGBT are not people; they are an ideology”—and for that matter an ideology “even more destructive” than communism—the statement instantly became the most widely discussed moment of the campaign.
Duda has now been reelected, narrowly defeating Rafał Trzaskowski, who, as the mayor of Warsaw, signed a vague
