'Donald floated the idea a couple of weeks ago during a powwow with his closest aides. We were in shock. To give half of the top spots in the PO election tickets to women? We started convincing him that we have too few local women leaders. But I guess the case is lost. If Donald comes up with some idea, he usually grows very attached to it,' a high-ranking PO politician tells Gazeta. 'He dismissed our arguments by saying that we'd find the women.'
Members of the party's Executive Committee (where the are two women for 15 men) don't like the prime minister's idea.
'You can hardly make a regional leader out of someone who isn't. This is creating women leaders in an artificial manner. I don't intend to cede my place to a woman only because she is a woman,' a member of the PO's decision-making body tells Gazeta.
Outside Warsaw, the sentiment is the same.
'We can't use social engineering and break strong candidates' careers only because they're men,' says Tadeusz Aziewicz, deputy head of the PO in Pomorskie. 'This would be negative discrimination against men.'
Even Zbigniew Chlebowski, leader of the PO caucus, has his doubts. 'A ticket leader has to be a locomotive, someone who will pull five or six more candidates after them.'
'General elections are two years away. We'll need to create the women leaders somehow,' adds Mr Chlebowski.
Joanna Mucha, a PO deputy from Lublin (won her seat from the fourth place on the ticket), so comments on the opposition of the men in the PO, 'One third of the votes cast on the ticket leader are votes cast on the party. The ticket leader always has their victory guaranteed. The men are afraid that if they run from the lower positions, where the party logo matters less and the candidate's personal record more, they won't make it.'
In the 2007 Sejm elections, out of the 41 electoral districts, only in five women led the PO's tickets:
Ewa Kopacz,
Julia Pitera, Elżbieta Radziszewska (all are cabinet ministers today), Elżbieta Łukacijewska (in the European elections in June fetched more votes than Marian Krzaklewski, the PO ticket leader), and Halina Rozpondek.
Paweł Graś, the cabinet spokesperson, points out that, also on Mr Tusk's orders, a woman had to be in one of the three top spots in all PO tickets in the last Sejm elections. We checked, and it was not always the case. There were no women in one of the three top spots in Wrocław, Gdynia (where Mr Aziewicz ran), or Lublin, among other places.
Members of the Congress of Polish Women, which in June started a debate on boosting women's presence in Polish politics, support Mr Tusk's idea. The Congress's initiators want a 50-percent gender parity for women in election tickets.
'The prime minister's initiative is great because it promotes women, but it won't replace a statutory parity regulation,' says Bożena Wawrzewska, director of the Congress's bureau.
'If Mr Tusk is replaced as party leader by someone like Julia Pitera, who is an opponent of parity, women will soon be driven out of the leading positions,' says Ms Wawrzewska.
As Gazeta has learned, Mr Tusk convinced his colleagues at the same meeting that the PO had to have an answer to the Congress's postulates. Because the prime minister is not in favour of an official, statutorily-guaranteed parity. He would rather that the parties introduced parity themselves.
'I don't want a statute to help me walk straight,' Waldy Dzikowski, the PO deputy leader, explains Mr Tusk. Some of the women in the PO are also against parity. Elżbieta Radziszewska, the government representative for equal treatment, told Gazeta that 'we should rather follow the path of education and promotion, to make sure that women believe in themselves and that men believe in them.'
The Polish public wants more women in politics. In a recent poll for Gazeta, as many as 61 percent of respondents spoke in favour of gender parity in election tickets.
