Did Conservatives in Poland Just Win the Culture War?

For nearly two decades, Poland—just like so many other countries in the Western Hemisphere—has been caught in a cultural battle over abortion, same-sex marriage, gender identity, and the role of religion in public life. And similarly to the rest of the West, the struggle was framed as an inevitable clash between a liberal future and a reactionary past—a matter of time before progressive victories followed the well-trodden paths of Paris, Madrid, and Berlin.

But 2025 tells a different story. Poland’s culture war—at least on a legal level—seems to be not only fading; it may even come to a slow halt with conservatives as its clear, last-one-standing winners. And the progressive dream of reshaping Poland in the image of Western Europe has stalled, failed, and may soon lose its grounding altogether.

For any principled conservative, the culture war is nowhere near marginal policy disputes. The term refers to crucial worldview differences over what it means to be human, what family is, and what rules, if any, should govern sex, life, and identity. Victory in such a war is not won by narrow electoral wins or temporary compromises. It is achieved when one worldview captures the public imagination, reshapes institutions, and renders its opponent obsolete in the public sphere. By that measure, it has to be admitted that progressives triumphed in much of the West: conservative parties long ago accepted (or sometimes even introduced) abortion rights, gay marriage, and new gender ideologies as permanent facts of life, with the result being the total progressive hegemony in these countries, which it is now politically suicidal to question.

At the same time, in Poland, despite decades of pressure, the cultural revolution never took hold. Attempts to legalize same-sex civil unions narrowly failed in 2013, even with a liberal government. A consecutive eight years of Law and Justice in power from 2015 to 2023 effectively halted every progressive initiative. The Constitutional Tribunal’s landmark 2020 ruling tightened abortion laws, sparking mass protests—but nothing changed legislatively as a result of pro-abortion “black strikes.” Even in today’s more fragmented parliament, dominated by the liberal coalition, attempts to liberalize abortion were defeated by a handful of votes (as a small number of MPs from the PSL center-right coalition party voted together with the conservatives) last year, while hate speech laws expanding protections for sexual minorities (and aiming for a legal crackdown on the conservative opposition) were effectively blocked by President Andrzej Duda and the Constitutional Tribunal.

In this context, it cannot be overstated how important recent presidential elections were for both sides of the culture war. For the progressives, victory offered a chance to break the deadlock and conduct a legal blitzkrieg after so many years of positional warfare. Rafał Trzaskowski, the urbane, pro-EU mayor of Warsaw, ran as a champion of revolutionary change, trying to navigate between ‘orthodox’ slogans of the liberal left—civil unions, wider abortion access, new hate speech protections—and proposals more attuned to contemporary challenges pertaining mainly to security and Poland’s international standing. 

After a highly dynamic and eventful campaign, he lost—and the last great offensive of progressives has been pulverized, as avowedly conservative Karol Nawrocki has secured victory and is about to be inaugurated into office on August 6th. With Nawrocki’s presidency, even if progressive bills enter parliament, they are dead on arrival. If Trzaskowski—the most polished, media-savvy liberal Poland could offer—couldn’t win on these issues, who can?

Looking ahead, Poland is drifting further right. The polls show that the next parliament may be dominated by Law and Justice and the nationalist Confederation, as the Right is enthusiastic about the recent victory and more voters are growing disappointed with Donald Tusk’s leadership. In such a context, the “progressive breakthrough” promised by Western observers just two years ago now looks like a vanishing dream, with no chance of being realized in any foreseeable future. It is clear that the liberal Left has failed both to change Poland’s laws and to sufficiently reshape its soul, which—as famous Polish writer and Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz once said—resembles a compass that “invariably turns to the right, as if it had a built-in magnetic needle pointing in that direction.” 

The defeat has sent shockwaves through the Polish Left, and the first cracks are already visible; the far-left Razem socialist party, which conducted a fairly successful campaign for their candidate, has noticeably toned down culturally progressive slogans, seeing the lack of potential for attracting more voters. At the same time, a nascent “alt-left” is now slowly emerging in a bottom-up process, rejecting progressive culture wars altogether in favor of old-school socialism focused on wages, housing, and workers’ rights. 

What is the reason for such a surprising turn of events? It is undoubtedly true that Poland’s religious heritage and traditional social fabric remain stronger than in most of Europe. But the deeper reason is that progressive politics, once boldly proclaiming itself to be the vanguard of the moral transformation of Western man, feels irrelevant in a world no longer defined by peace and prosperity. The promise of 1968—total freedom to remake sex, family, and morality—only seemed to appeal when material stability made such experiments seem harmless.

Today, Poland faces a plethora of challenges: war on its border, a demographic crisis, economic uncertainty, and growing migration pressures. These are existential concerns, and in their context, debates about unlimited bodily autonomy or redefining the family seem like indulgent distractions. Young Poles may still be drifting from organized religion, but that doesn’t mean they are automatically buying into Western-style progressivism. Many are instead turning to conservative or nationalist parties that promise order, security, and a future worth fighting for—even without religion acting as an intermediary force. 

If these problems continue to dominate the attention of Polish society, the culture war may soon finally burn out—not with compromise, but with victory for the conservative vision of family and life. It was a defensive triumph, but a triumph nonetheless, as unborn life is still being protected, freedom of speech is preserved, traditional marriage remains the legal norm, and religion is not forced out of the public sphere. Of course, the social aspects of the revolution are visible—a rising number of divorces, secularization, and the quite progressive morals of the younger generation—but the situation has not been made much worse with legal changes. There may be hope that with good legal foundations and a decrease in progressive cultural pressure, Poland may enter the path of healing the social fabric. 

Perhaps the greatest irony is this: by simply holding out, Poland may have just outlasted the energy of the 1968 revolution. Its slogans no longer inspire. Its demands sound dated, even absurd, in an age of war and uncertainty. 

As the culture war ceases, a new chapter opens. Freed from decades of imported ideological conflict, Polish politics can finally turn to the real questions of statecraft: how to grow, defend, and sustain a nation. In that future, social experimentation takes a backseat to survival, and the old truths about family and life, fiercely defended, might just become the basis for renewal.