Poland’s governing party, Law and Justice, has seized on the declaration and the issue of gay rights in its campaigning for European Union elections in May and for national elections this fall.
Where the party once attacked migrants as a threat to the soul of the country, gay people have become its public enemy No. 1 in recent weeks.
It is part of a growing trend across eastern and central Europe, where nationalist and populist parties are increasingly turning to cultural issues — and attacks on gay people — to rally their faithful.
From Romania, where the government tried and failed to change the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, to Hungary, where homosexuals are vilified as a threat to traditional families, the letters L.G.B.T. are being scorned as part of a broader struggle against what the nationalists and populists call “European values.”
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Law and Justice and the most powerful politician in Poland, used the party’s convention in March to declare that this was a war Poland must win to survive.
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“I think that Poland will be a region free from L.G.B.T.,” said Elzbieta Kruk, who is running on the party’s list for a seat in the European Parliament. “I hope it will be.”
Somebody dreamed that Germany would be Judenrein, a while back, and we know how that worked out.
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Leading Polish figures in the Roman Catholic Church, itself reeling from revelations about sexual abuse by priests, have also joined in.
Ah, the same Polish Church that played so signal a role during and before the Holocaust is making Catholics the world over proud, again.
The Rev. Marek Dziewiecki, a well-known Catholic priest and educator, told a local radio station in a recent interview that the plus in “L.G.B.T.Q.+” stood for “pedophiles, zoophiles, necrophiles,” and that the ultimate goal was to “make people into infertile erotomaniacs.”
When some 1,500 supporters of far-right groups came to Czestochowa, Poland’s holiest site, this month, the Rev. Henryk Grzadko warned those gathered that Poland was experiencing a “civilizational invasion.”
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Rafal Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw, who issued the tolerance declaration, said that while he had expected a cynical response from the government, he worried about the sort of propaganda state outlets had produced.
It was the same kind of bile, he said, that led a man to fatally stab the mayor of Gdansk, Pawel Adamowicz, on live television this year.
Matteo Salvini Announces New European Alliance of Far-Right Populists
Matteo Salvini, the anti-immigrant politician who is the most powerful figure in Italy’s government, on Monday announced the formation of a new European alliance of populist and far-right parties ahead of critical European Parliament elections in May.
“Others will join between now and the 26th of May,” the last day of voting, Mr. Salvini, leader of the League party in Italy, said at an event in Milan with allies from Denmark, Finland and Germany.
“Our objective is to be the force of government and change in Europe.”
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Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Gathering party, did not attend the announcement on Monday, though she has signaled her support for the new group.
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“We are working for a big party for the new Europe,” said Mr. Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister and interior minister, whose efforts overlap with those of Steve Bannon, the former strategist for President Trump.
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Jörg Meuthen, a leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, said at the news conference that there were absent partners “who will join us soon.”
Immediately after the elections in May, he said, the allied parties will form a new group in the European Parliament called the European Alliance of Peoples and Nations, the result of numerous meetings over recent months.
Olli Kotro, a member of the Finns Party who attended the event, was more cautious, saying, “It remains to be seen who will join us.”
While they share common ground when it comes to strong borders against migration and an emphasis on traditional, national identities, Europe’s far-right populists also disagree on many points of policy.
Mr. Salvini’s German and Scandinavian partners lean toward free-market economics, while their French allies are more protectionist.
Mr. Salvini has argued repeatedly that other European Union members must take their fair share of migrants, but some countries, like Hungary, have slammed the door shut.
Mr. Salvini has argued repeatedly that other European Union members must take their fair share of migrants, but some countries, like Hungary, have slammed the door shut.
And Poland does not share the warmth that Mr. Salvini and other populists have toward Russia.
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