Poland roiled by “partnership” legislation

Polish domestic politics are currently roiled by the resurgence of an old issue: how to create domestic partnerships, while not calling them that.

At an October 17 press conference in Warsaw, representatives of multiple parties making up the “October 15” coalition of the incumbent government of liberal Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced agreement on a slimmed-down “closest persons” bill they plan to introduce in Parliament. The “October 15 Coalition” refers to the elections two years ago that brought that group of parties to power, replacing the conservative Law and Justice Party, which had governed Poland since 2015.

The bill seeks to amend Polish law to confer various legal rights on someone’s designated “closest person,” including medical information and decision-making, joint tax filing (and possibly joint property rights), and inheritance. Answers to questions about joint custody of children remain unclear.

The legislation is framed to say it is not introducing a variant of “marriage” or even “civil partnership” but only creating a new legal network of rights for “closest persons.” The euphemism is deliberate. On the one hand, the “October 15 Coalition” includes the small “Polish People’s Party” (PSL), without whose support the Coalition could not have cobbled together a majority even internally. PSL was insistent that any bill not appear to offer a substitute for marriage or the rights of married spouses. On the other hand, dropping the terms “marriage” or even “partnership” allowed the Coalition to distance itself from five previous failures while spinning advocacy for the bill on “love is love” (“who can be against rights for one’s ‘closest person’?’)—grounds.

PSL demanded that any bill not only eschew the term “marriage” but also any resemblance to marriage in the establishment of the new legal relationship. To that end, the bill had to abandon previous efforts to have such relationships recorded like marriages before the local Civil Registrar. The “closest person” relationship will be effectuated by a document signed before a notary. (In Poland, notaries are more significant than U.S. notary publics. They might be comparable to first-tier lawyers.)

Some historical context: PSL is a divided party. With roots before World War II in the populist agrarian movement, it contains some conservative elements but historically has subordinated them to the desire to coalesce with whomever held power at a given moment. That is why, almost until the end of communism, it was a satellite party to the Polish communists. Its position on the political spectrum frequently makes its appeal as a coalition partner disproportionate to its size.

As distasteful as the bill’s compromises are to Lewica (the “Left,” the coalition of parties comparable to the hard American “progressive” woke Left), spokeswoman Katarzyna Kotula–who is leading this effort–admitted they were indispensable to initiating any legislation under the Tusk government. Kotula, previously “Minister for Equality” in the Tusk cabinet, is in a “relationship.” Constitutionally, the Tusk government must face elections by October 2028, although there are expectations that it may fall earlier.

The fate of the legislation is dubious. While the current compromise may push it through a Tusk-majority Parliament, it will almost certainly be vetoed by just-elected Law and Justice President Karol Nawrocki. Parliament has insufficient votes for an override. Article 18 of the Polish Constitution declares that the state has a responsibility for the protection of marriage “as a union of a woman and a man.”

Facing such an outcome, why push the bill? Right now, the matter is largely symbolic. Poland’s Left and secularists have never gotten this far in advancing such partnership legislation. Parliamentary approval, even in the face of a certain presidential veto, would be a first.

The Tusk government may hope to use the bill as a campaign issue. Immediately before dropping this bill, the “October 15 Coalition” took to social media in an organized campaign to showcase its “achievements” since 2023. Most of them were started under the prior Law and Justice government, but by October 17, the Tusk government moved to its signature victories, starting with taxpayer-funded in vitro fertilization (IVF). Government spokesmen crowed that 6,000 babies–“enough for a small commune”–had been born under the plan. Tusk himself made a show of visiting the farmhouse of a newborn IVF baby girl to highlight his commitment to “families.” Introducing the “closest persons” bill the same day underscored the government’s commitment to a secularized social and family policy.

Campaigning in Poland on such a platform has some appeal. Despite caricatures of pervasive Polish Catholicism, religiosity in the population has been declining. Ever since the fall of communism, the Polish Left has painted the Church as an ecclesiastical tyranny bent on controlling Poles’ lives while replacing democracy with a “confessional state” (państwo wyznaniowe). It plays on anti-clerical sentiment against a “privileged” Church. The current government has advanced this policy in various ways—e.g., its pro-abortion Minister of Education unilaterally cut school-based religious education to one hour/week while imposing a gender-ideologized “family life” curriculum on schools.

The Tusk government probably counts on some international support for its “closest persons” bill. While the United States is currently likely to keep its peace, the European Union will probably lend support. The European Commission just announced a five-year gender ideology program with a possible $4 billion commitment. Multiple Western European leaders descended on Budapest last June for a “Pride March” to protest Hungarian legislation protecting minors from gender ideology.

Because marriage remains (for now) a “national competency” within the EU, states have not been forced to adopt “same-sex marriage.” The Commission has, however, demanded that states afford legal recognition to the consequences of those who have; for example, someone “married” in a country allowing homosexual “marriage” must receive spousal rights in all EU countries, even those that do not allow such “marriage.”

The European Court of Human Rights, though lacking the legal enforcement powers of the European Court of Justice, also maintains that states must provide “some” form of civil recognition to stable, nonmarital partnerships, both homo- and heterosexual. The new “closest persons” bill will probably be hawked as helping meet “Poland’s obligations” towards ECHR “standards,” particularly since noncompliance with “human rights” (especially as understood in Western European countries) is seen as a national black eye.

The Polish Left has gone out in force on social media to push its “closest persons” bill. It focuses on two primary lines of argument: love and divorce. Revitalizing the “love is love” narrative previously employed in other Western countries to eventually enact homosexual “marriage,” the contention is that one’s “closest person” needs enhanced legal rights towards a partner. Seeking to tar their opponents’ pro-family image, particularly in Law and Justice circles, it brands them as hypocrites by posting pictures of critics who are divorced and remarried, portraying marital instability as a right-wing phenomenon.

Conspicuously absent from the Polish debate are allusions to history. In almost all countries where partnership legislation (whatever it is called) has been introduced, it has almost always served as a halfway house to legal homosexual “marriage.” In some jurisdictions, that transition was forced by courts asserting that this “partnership” is a discriminatory, second-class way station (an undercurrent in the Polish debate). In others, the lobbying pressure to create partnerships simply continued to create “marriage” independent of sexual differentiation and/or any nexus to procreation.