Greens after Party Conference

The previous weekend (16 and 17 April) Polish Greens gathered in Warsaw for the fourth Party Conference. It was my third party congress since I joined the Greens, and so far the most exciting one. We made some changes in the ranks of our leadership: Dariusz Szwed has retained his position of the male co-chair, while Agnieszka Grzybek has been replaced by Małgorzata Tkacz-Janik as the female co-chair of the party. But what is the most important, we had occasion to discuss and update our political programme. What it means to be "Green" in today's Poland? What sort of alternative to the dominant Civic Platform -- and to the political scene in general -- are we dreaming of? We have always been an anti-neoliberal party, but what it precisely means in 2010, seven years after our party's establishment?

After the conference, some are speaking of a "social turn" in our politics, while others claim we simply made our long-held principles more detailed. Anyway, there is a sense of breakthrough. At the conference we adopted four documents: on electoral law, on social policy, on public health, and on education. It is now much clearer what do we stand for in these domains, what sort of electoral reform do we propose in order to reopen Poland's political landscape, and what our vision of social justice is like.

In electoral law we stand for the opening of political scene for new parties and movements by lowering thresholds, as well as introducing restrictions on commercial electoral campaigns. We also support better representation of women in politics and lowering of the voting age in local elections to 16.

In social policy, public health & education we stand for the vision of public services strongly opposed to their commodification and privatisation. Especially health and education should be treated as human rights, and not commodities. We want better protection of women's rights in employment, health, and education policy. We support employment policy based on jobs creation, and not only on the "activation" of the unemployed. We want to foster better work-life balance in order to support public health and create better conditions for gender equality within family. We stand for policies that would diminish social and economic inequalities between people.

Sounds great, ain't it? What we still lack, however, is the power to translate it into binding laws and policies. But no worry, next local elections will be soon.

Dariusz Szwed and Małgorzata Tkacz-Janik, co-chairs


Ewa Charkiewicz and Paweł Fischer-Kotowski


Johann Bros


Adam Ostolski


Bartłomiej Kozek


Bartłomiej Kozek, Irena Kołodziej and Aleksandra Kretkowska


Hanna Gill-Piątek and Wojtek Kłosowski, voting


photo by: Maciej "Psych" Smykowski

NYT on Poland's young Left

Twenty years after the fall of communism, an attempt to rejuvenate the left is in full swing in Poland, led by a circle of young idealists, who argue that the time has come to open up political discourse to ideas that have long been demonized because of the country’s communist past. - writes Dan Bilefsky in "The New York Times" (12th March, 2010).

More: Polish Left Gets Transfusion of Young Blood.

Gender policy or gender politics?

Five years down the road of EU enlargement, the dominant mood is one of disappointment. Is this simply a crisis of leadership (some have even begun speaking of a backlash) in the European Union? Or are we perhaps dealing with a broader phenomenon sometimes referred to as "gender fatigue"? What may be at stake here is the exhaustion of a certain strategy of pushing for women’s rights – a strategy whose present embodiment is in the "gender mainstreaming" policy. We might also ask whether we are facing three separate challenges here, or three aspects of the same impasse – in European political institutions, in social attitudes, and inside women’s organization? If the backlash in the EU, gender fatigue in the workplace and disaffection with gender mainstreaming within the women’s movement are three separate independent phenomena, then the recipe for our problems would be to continue doing what we have done all along, only more effectively. If, however, we are dealing with various aspects of a single crisis, then we need to ask about its root causes.

In the article The European Union, Gender Politics and Social Change in a collection Gender in the EU (pp. 30-32) published by the Heinrich Bőll Stiftung, I am trying to trace the consequences of the replacing of feminist politics with "gender policy". What is the true meaning of the recent exchange of politics for policy? What happens, when we leave behind struggle for change, and try to negotiate the administration of change instead? Will we be able to restore the momentum of social movements, and their utopian power? These questions are pertinent not only for feminist struggle, but for the environmental and other struggles as well.

Adam Ostolski