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Poland, ahead of a snap general election

— PHOTO: AP

Poland’s Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski (right), and Donald Tusk, the leader of the opposition Civic Platform, before a television debate in Warsaw on October 12.

They speak together on the phone at least 10 times a day. They complete each other’s sentences. Both are silver-haired, rotund and 5ft 5in tall. For anyone but the most sharp-eyed, it is next to impossible to spot the difference between Poland’s leaders, the identical Kaczynski twins. There are distinctions. For example, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the Prime Minister, lives with his mother, and hair from her cats can sometimes be detected on the trousers she presses fo r him. Lech Kaczynski, the President, has a slightly chubbier face with a couple of moles on one cheek.

But these differences are essentially academic, according to Slawomir Sierakowski, editor of the left-wing journal Krytyka Polityczna, which once got the brothers mixed up in a front-page story. “They think with one brain,” he says. “They stick together against the European Union, against the whole world if needs be.”

They are two men who appear to operate as one, and their central mission since coming to power — the President in 2005 and the Prime Minister 15 months ago — has been to restore Polish pride, and to get the world to sit up and take notice of their country. They have done this by driving through their own version of social cleansing, after years of what they see as moral decline, and by turning Germany into a bogeyman and ramping up Poland’s fractious relationship with Russia. They have indeed been getting their country noticed, but whether it is for the right reasons is another question.

Vehemently homophobic and nationalist, the Roman Catholic twins have certainly engendered a new climate of fear in Poland in their short time in control, largely as a result of their paranoia about a “grey network” of former communists they believe to be at work in every corner of national life since the fall of Polish communism in 1989. They have also created an anti-corruption agency that takes its orders directly from the President: 500 hand-picked men assigned to defend what the brothers call their “fourth republic.” When the agency men strike, arresting everyone from allegedly crooked politicians to surgeons suspected of taking bribes from patients, they do it on television, wearing masks and dressed head to toe in black.

Given all this, you might expect the outcome of the October 21 snap government election to be a foregone conclusion. But the situation turns out to be far from simple.

While the Kaczynskis’ stock has fallen in office, it has not plummeted. Instead, their Law and Justice party now finds itself in an election cliffhanger, more or less level in the polls with its liberal rival, Civic Platform, led by Donald Tusk. As far as most Polish people are concerned, this is the most important election since the fall of communism, and the twins have responded with a surprisingly slick election campaign, outmanoeuvring many of their rivals.

Mention the Kaczynski twins to ordinary Poles, and you quickly understand why the outcome of Sunday’s general election is far from certain: their reactions reveal a nation divided.

In Warsaw’s leafy residential district of Zoliborz, where the Kaczynskis were born 58 years ago and 45 minutes apart, the mood among many older residents explains the support that brought the Kaczynskis and their Law and Justice party to power: worries about corruption, unemployment, a communist revival, and foreign domination. They talk about the “enemies” whom the brothers have proved so skilled at defining with the help of the fundamentalist Catholic radio station Radio Maryja (whose ageing audience is collectively known as the “mohair-beret brigade”).

Coming off an eight-hour shift at Zoliborz’s Church of St Stanislaw Kostka — the twins’ local parish church — are church wardens Janek, 71, and Wladyslaw, 73 (they did not want to give their surnames). Since 6 a.m. they have been preparing the church for mass, sweeping the aisles. They describe themselves as passionate Kaczynski supporters. They are also weary, frustrated Polish pensioners, who feel that a life’s hard work has been repaid with low pensions and an ungrateful youth.

“In our opinion, the Kaczynskis are the only ones,” says Janek. “Law and Justice can be equated with [the former priest] Popieluszko, in terms of its moral values and the way it stands up to the bad forces in society. The Kaczynskis share justice and honesty with Popieluszko; they are fighting for us poor against those who stole the national wealth.”

There are many more excluded and disadvantaged Poles who feel like this, not only on Zoliborz’s streets but throughout the country. It helps that the brothers themselves are considered honest, modest, and incorruptible by people like this. The twins’ predecessors — including the former President Lech Walesa, a one-time Kaczynski ally now turned foe — were seen to have badly failed post-communist Poland, allowing sleaze and corruption to flourish.

On the other side of the divide, young urban Poles meet to talk in the quirky pubs, bars, and clubs that have sprouted in Warsaw’s former communist palaces of culture, converted factories, and basements. These Poles are getting on with their lives despite their country’s politics. All have friends or relatives who have worked abroad; most have worked abroad themselves, and most have jobs that probably did not exist 18 years ago — or at least only in very different forms. Almost all of their parents were forced to change their jobs when communism collapsed.

In this milieu, the Kaczynskis are viewed with derision. On one satirical website, the brothers announce they are cloning themselves, and that once there are millions of them they will dominate Europe, and then the world. In a song, they sing: “Everyone has to think like me and my brother.”

Beneath the derision runs a strong strand of real worry. Many Poles view this election as a kind of repeating nightmare, one as horrifying as the 1962 Polish children’s film The Two Who Stole the Moon, in which — extraordinarily, as fate would have it — the Kaczynski brothers, then aged 12, starred as mean, small-minded creatures who hatch a plot to steal the moon so they may never have to work again. Whatever the outcome of the election, Mr. Jaroslaw Kaczynski will either continue as a coalition Prime Minister, or he will become head of the largest opposition party, and Mr. Lech Kaczynski will remain President at least until the next presidential elections in a couple of years.

Mr. Walesa says Poles now face a stark choice: “Either we look inwards and towards the past, or outwards and to the future. The twins want the former.” “Troublemakers,” who are good for nothing except “chaos and destruction,” is how he depicts them. Another former ally, Radek Sikorski, who was until earlier this year the Kaczynskis’ Defence Minister but is now standing for the Civic Platform, believes Mr. Jaroslaw Kaczynski has created a “sect-like following” and represents an old-fashioned Poland at odds with modern reality. “The Prime Minister does not have a bank account,” he says. “He does not have a driving licence. He’s never used the Internet. He doesn’t know how to send an SMS. And he lives with his mother. He’s an anachronism.”

This echoes the view of many of the hundreds of thousands of Poles who have migrated to places such as Britain in the past three years in search of work and a new life, and who follow events back home with exasperation.

What the diaspora thinks about the twins does matter for the country’s future. In the U.K. alone, 500,000 are eligible to vote (although only 69,000 have actually registered to do so in this election). And whether they vote or not, the real question for Poland in the years to come may be: will the next leader make it a country young people want to call home? — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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