You will never walk alone. Solidarity, political polarisation and state violence in contemporary Poland

In 2016, during the first term of the Law and Justice’s government, an attempt to narrow down the circumstances under which one can have legal abortion sparked a series of protests in Poland. The first mass mobilisation happened in 2016, then in the following years the mobilisations around the same issue happened multiple times. They usually were rather a spontaneous reaction to the events that concerned women health and rights or civic rights for other less privileged groups like LGBTQ+. The protests continued during the second term of the Law and Justice’s government and faced a more peremptory response from the state, sometimes a violent one. The intensification of the anti-gender rhetoric in the public space, establishment of the LGBTQ+ free zones in several municipalities, the presence of the antiabortion vans (with tarpaulins covered with photos of dead and malformed foetuses and/or the speakers playing anti-gender statements) in the cities, the persecutions of those who try to stop those cars and finally, the detention of one of the activists – Margot (non-binary, queer person) – led to more street protests. The series of protests allowed on creating an environment in which masses can be mobilised against the political decisions and the state hegemony. In this paper, I focus on analysing the events connected with the scapegoating of the LGBTQ+ community in Poland, the women’s protests and the first signs of the state violence and police brutality against the activists. By doing so, I show how the growing social polarisation creates the potential for a united front and is a sign of resistance against the increasingly authoritarian politics. By revising the Laclauian concept of populism and by reconstructing the protests discourse I am mapping the emergence of the chain of equivalence and I analyse the antagonistic articulation towards the current Polish government. Populism, often described as irrational, heavily based on the emotions of fear and anger, and often connected with right-wing, authoritarian ideology, in this paper, I go beyond that, showing that the initial mobilisation based on fear and anger can lead to the emergence of radically empathetic and inclusive political articulations. By showing the connection between the fight for the right to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights – as both groups of protesters are presented as the enemies of the state and the hegemonic Heterosexual-Pole-Catholic discourse – I propose to theorise the discourse of the protests as populist.