A new political group known as the Women's Party appeared on the scene in the last week of 2006 to proclaim gender equality and address long-standing complaints that women's participation in Polish politics is inadequate.

The group plans to fight for women's rights. "I want women in Poland to be treated as rightful citizens," Manuela Gretkowska, the founder of the Women's Party, said Dec. 24. "Polish women pay taxes just like men, but our laws are not adjusted to meet women's needs. The female part of society feels discriminated against from birth to retirement with their old-age pensions being much lower than those of men." Gretkowska, who is a popular writer and columnist, said her party would strive to "remove the disparity between women's and men's pensions and fight discrimination on the labor market."

Women's pensions are now lower because women reach statutory retirement age five years earlier than men-men retire at 65, women at 60. However, the demands voiced by the Women's Party do not include any proposal to make the retirement age equal for both sexes, something that experts say could effectively boost women's pensions.

Gretkowska said the Women's Party would also deal with issues related to health care, including efforts to ensure "decent childbirth conditions" in public hospitals, obligatory and free periodical medical examinations for all women, and refunds on contraceptives and infertility treatments. At present, only four contraceptive drugs are refunded from the national budget.

The founding members of the Women's Party, who have collected nearly 3,000 signatures under its registration application, said their party was still at a formative stage and it was too early to define its agenda as a whole. They made no mention of any prospective allies among the existing parliamentary and nonparliamentary groups.

Gretkowska said her party would be open to both women and men. One of the group's founders is Prof. Wiktor Osiatyński, a 61-year-old lawyer who specializes in the history of political and legal doctrines.

At the group's launch, Osiatyński said large parties had many goals to fight and therefore women's rights were often of marginal importance in their agendas. "The Women's Party is unlikely to gain a majority necessary to take over power nor should it aspire to do so," Osiatyński said. "We have to focus on a specific goal-to improve the situation for women in Poland."

Gretkowska made it clear that her party's mission was to make sure that women enter parliament with their own party-and under the slogan "Poland Is a Woman." She explained the slogan meant that "women who are members of the party or support it believe that this country is us because its fate and our own fate is in our hands."

Until now, Gretkowska, 42, had not taken part in any form of political life. She had been associated with the feminist movement and was known as a writer who often shocked her readers with intimate themes verging on pornography. Her name was mentioned in a political context only once, in the spring of 2006 when she was a regular contributor to the monthly Sukces. She wrote a feature in which she attacked brothers Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński, Poland's president and prime minister. Following intervention from the president's press office, the text was physically removed from the issue just before the magazine hit the newsstands. Offended, Gretkowska broke off her cooperation with Sukces, and several other well-known authors followed in her footsteps.

The publisher of Sukces argued this drastic form of self-censorship was caused by factual errors in Gretkowska's article, errors that she herself admitted. Anyway, the affair was given a political dimension and Gretkowska gained a reputation as an author persecuted by the Kaczyński brothers and one of the first victims of the alleged reinstatement of governmental censorship.