Decline of the Polish Family – Internal Reasons, External Excuses

The PiS government's pro-family policies haven’t materialised, so they are running interference with disinformation

7 March 2023

Paweł Marczewski

Marcin Król Fellow

What constitutes a family in Poland is changing rapidly, but the ruling party won’t accept or adapt to the new reality.

The declining fertility rate in Poland, which dropped to 1.32 in 2021, has forced government officials and members of the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) to resort to counterfactual rhetoric, i.e. disinformation, in order to explain the changes to the family unit.

When after an initial increase number of births per woman nearly returned to the level before the conservative party took power in 2015, decision-makers started blaming the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine as factors contributing to global insecurity preventing potential parents from having children.

In others words, if it were not for the coronavirus and Putin, Law and Justice’s family programmes would have brought the desired increase in fertility rates.

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Paweł Marczewski

Marcin Król Fellow

Marcin Król Fellow. Paweł Marczewski is head of the research unit Citizens at the ideaForum, think tank of the Batory Foundation, a member of the Carnegie Civic Research Network, and an affiliated researcher at the SWPS Youth Study Center. He holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Warsaw. His main areas of interest are relations between demographic changes and democracy, social movements, civil society organizations, and social justice. He is a contributing writer at the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny and a member of the editorial board of Przegląd Polityczny quarterly, his comments and articles appeared also in the Nation, Public Seminar, Eurozine, as well as major Polish dailies Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita. In the years 2011-2017, he was an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Warsaw, in 2015-2017 also head of publications at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

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