As a Polish woman, I was petrified watching the new bill for a near-total ban on abortion slowly make its way through the Polish legislative process. When the bill was finally outvoted last Thursday after the mass protests among Poles and Polish expats across the world, I sighed with relief.

However, this issue will no doubt continue to haunt the Polish political scene and is likely to re-emerge in the future as it is a result of deeper underlying tensions.

Poland is a conflicted country: morally, religiously, economically, and politically – there is no end to its tensions. The urban, well-educated, often atheist Poles value above all their liberty of choice, while rural Poland is pronouncedly Catholic and wants not only to preserve, but also actively promote the Catholic values via legislative and punitive means. One of them flourishing suffocates the other.

This is a source of never-ending political and religious conflicts, corruption and great disillusionment with politics among my generation. The recent Polish conflict concerning the near-total abortion ban is just one expression of the wider tensions.

The only possible solution to allow both factions to flourish would be to provide both the ‘freedom to’, by increasing living standards, improving healthcare and education, increasing economic innovation and therefore augmenting the minimum wage.

Although low wages may have caused Western European firms to relocate to Poland, the statutory minimum wages in Poland are among the lowest in Europe and they don’t provide for a decent living standard. Many would associate less regulation with a thriving economy, yet in Poland, this was achieved at the price of letting those on the lowest pay suffer greatly.

Was the trade-off too high? What could we have done since to increase wages and stop the new class of the ‘precariat’ – those in an economically precarious situation – from emerging? The underlying problem behind the seemingly religious tensions is therefore economic. A lack of welfare causes ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ divisions upon which populist parties like the Law and Justice (PiS) Party thrive.

The solutions should be grounded in economic innovation, in providing better welfare and public services. But the Polish government and the PiS-dominated parliament have come to power because of those tensions.

Although I try to avoid classifying politicians as populist, they do have all have one common trait: they thrive on division within nations. They create and sustain the ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ opposition. Be it the atheist vs. religious, urban vs. rural, national vs. immigrant divides, the mechanism is the same – for Trump, Marine Le Pen or the Law and Justice Party.

The Polish context is unique in evoking Catholic values and a certain historic national ethos, providing a society where these conflicts will keep re-emerging and making headlines across the world. It creates conflicting political factions, who control and manipulate the media, challenging democracy by undermining the neutrality of the judiciary.

I am ashamed that instead of trying to solve the problems that continue to make our country suffer, we instead engage in this never-ending internal war. Polish political leaders are governing based on conviction, at the price of making guided decisions.

In the light of all of this, as a young Polish expat woman who has studied in the UK for three years, I will make my way into the world as a member of the ‘precariat’ - as someone without certainty or assurance, stuck in between statuses and nations.

On the one hand, I am an independent, liberal feminist, not wanting to live in a society where a near-total ban on abortion and punitive means to enforce it is considered, instead craving one which provides support for women to consider choosing not to have an abortion. On the other hand, I often feel like an outsider in the UK, fearing the xenophobia towards Poles. Always feeling like I have to prove myself because I am not British, and experiencing the psychological strains. Neither really Polish anymore, nor British.

Being an ambitious young Pole in today’s Europe comes at the price of compromising part of our national identity and of agreeing to a conflicted status. I attended one of the leading schools in Poland and a lot of my friends have now left Cracow to study in top universities in Germany, France, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US.

Those who stayed often pull their weight – studying two or more degrees at once, not knowing whether it will be the law degree or the finance one that will provide them employment in the future Poland.

Essentially, we see ourselves as Europeans, fully appreciative of the responsibilities and rights that this status carries with it. In the light of recent political debates, however, we are all starting to see that this identification will no longer provide a sense of identity. After the initial euphoria of having a united Europe and the open Schengen zone, we are now in a state of decline, conflicted over what we want Europe to be and where we see ourselves in it.