The late Polish president’s twin has come from nowhere to be a serious contender
BEFORE WARSAW’S gleaming presidential palace, an elderly woman kneels in the midday sun before a portrait of the late President Lech Kaczynski.
As she prays, a disembodied voice saying “Poland is the most important thing” floats through the air, sounding remarkably like the late president, who died last April in a plane crash near Katyn in Russia. It’s the voice of Jaroslaw Kaczynski emanating from speakers across the street at the headquarters of his campaign to succeed his late twin brother as Poland’s next head of state.
“We don’t really know what happened in Katyn, there are so many mysteries that I think it was a coup,” says Julia Pajaczkarska (75), rising from her knees to adjust the red and white rosary beads around the portrait of the late first couple. “I’m voting for Jaroslaw to finish Lech’s work. He’s a good patriot who will defend the homeland.”
In just two months Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the national conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS), has come from nowhere to be a serious contender. But the 61-year-old is an almost unrecognisable figure from the the prickly populist who annoyed his European neighbours as prime minister for two years in office until 2007.
That Jaroslaw Kaczynski masterminded an emotional, nationalistic crusade against corruption and communists in Poland. This Jaroslaw Kaczynski is a soft-spoken, conciliatory figure.
“After the [Katyn] tragedy, we experienced the new face of our society, of solidarity and unity,” he said after visiting his twin brother’s grave yesterday on their 61st birthday. “Politics should learn from that to become more calm and matter-of-fact.”
It’s been an exhausting few weeks for Poles: first the Katyn crash robbed the country of many leading public figures, then weeks of flooding claimed a dozens lives and countless livelihoods.
Political observers say Kaczynski’s new solidarity image is in tune with the times – and taps into voters’ longing for calm and cohesion.
“These tragedies have moved Poland. [The country] has moved to a more mature level of western Europe where the form and style of politics isn’t so emotional,” said Rafal Chwedonik, a political scientist at Warsaw University.
Opinion is divided over whether Kaczynski is a changed man – or whether his new image is a campaign construct to milk the sympathy vote. “It is possible to talk of post-traumatic growth,” said social psychologist Janusz Czapinski. “The subject experiences a radical change in their value system and discovers new truths. Jaroslaw Kaczynski may have hit a brick wall and realised he cannot realise his vision of Poland his old way.” But not everyone is convinced. At a Kaczynski campaign stop in Poznan, demonstrators chanted “Give Kaczynski an Oscar for acting so well that he’s changed”.
Either way, the PiS leader’s campaign has caught his opponents off guard and left the liberal conservative Civic Platform (PO) frustrated and worried.
For weeks their candidate Bronislaw Komorowksi had a clear lead in the campaign after the April plane crash thrust the 58-year-old parliamentary speaker into the spotlight as acting president.
If confirmed as president, Komorowksi has promised to green-light health and education reforms blocked for years by a political stand-off between Kaczynski and the PO government of prime minister Donald Tusk.
But Komorowski, though a pleasant man, has proven a staid campaigner. He struggled to demonstrate empathy with rural Poles in devastated villages, remarking: “With floods last year and this year, you must be used to it by now.” He has struggled, too, to explain what he would bring to the office – apart from passing legislation from the PO government. “Poland is a tremendous success, a country that has managed to realise its dream of freedom, I think we have common dreams,” he told a modestly attended rally yesterday in the seaside resort of Sopot. Listening were many admirers but many frustrated voters too.
One called Komorowski a “soft bread roll”, others said they would vote for him to stop Kaczynski rather than out of conviction. “This campaign was full of populist generalisations on all sides,” said Maciej, a student.
As Kaczynski closed the gap to just six points, final polls showed Komorowski short of the absolute majority needed to avoid a run-off in two weeks.
A second round would give Kaczynski time to drum up extra support while the PO worries its younger, urban voters may head off on holidays and lose interest in voting on July 4th.
Tomorrow’s election – ostensibly to appoint a new head of state – is as much about whether Poles believe Kaczynski is using the death of his brother to repackage himself or whether voters believe he has, in fact, changed his spots.