September 20, 2007 (the date of publication in Russian)
Grigory Tinsky
THE GAMES OF THE TWINS. PART 2
Poland: the pre-election landscape
Part 1: http://www.rpmonitor.ru/en/en/detail.php?ID=5941
THE FAILED PINCH SHOW
During two years of their rule in Warsaw, brothers Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski have created a lot of scandals in domestic and foreign policy. Still, the twins, despite obvious lack of education, are keeping themselves in power with the same method of producing even more scandals.
Yet in his capacity of Justice Minister and General Prosecutor in Jerzy Buzek's government, Lech Kaczynski positioned himself as an adamant fighter against corruption, initiating a number of sensational criminal cases. Being eventually discharged, he only capitalized in the eyes of the electorate as a victim of injustice. The fact that the criminal cases collapsed before getting into the court, was also interpreted in his favor: he claimed that this collapse was paid by the same corrupted politicians who arranged his dismissal.
Realizing that their rule may collapse before the next elections to the Sejm, their success in the race being almost closed out, the twins invented a new propagandist experiment. The choice of the object was narrow. It was not expedient to crack upon political opponents as well as their own party members. Therefore, the twins attacked their coalition allies.
The League of Polish Families, chaired by Andrzej Lepper, and the Self-Defense Party, representing Polish peasants, were rather allies of the moment than true associates. In a number of issues, including attitude to the war in Iraq, the allies could not reach concord.
The political attack on Lepper's party started on July 7, when the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau – a new agency, established by Kaczynski's government, seized Andrzej K. and Peter R. According to the press service of the new law enforcement institution, these two persons proposed small businessmen a deal, promising to change the status of their land properties from an agricultural land into a housing area. They referred to their connections in the Ministry of Agroindustry, which has got the relevant competence. On the same day, police intervened into the office of the ministry, and already on July 9, Andrzej Lepper, Vice Premier and Minister of Agroindustry, was released of his duties, as a person suspected of corruption.
Very soon, the whole thing turned out to be an operation of the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau. The two businessmen, who addressed Andrzej K. and Peter R., were the Bureau's agents; the talks were wiretapped; the only flaw was that the suspects refused to take money at the last moment, rejecting the deal. In any normal country, such a development would be regarded as a failure of operation, the criminal case being either closed or "frozen". However, the Kaczynskis did not have time for observation; the events had to develop not according to the law, but according to the rules of show business. It was clear that the corruptionists were warned by someone.
EXCHANGE OF BLOWS
While the operative services were searching for the "mole", the coalition members started an exchange of blows. Lepper declared his withdrawal from the coalition, which meant the loss of the parliamentary majority by PiS, and therefore, snap elections.
However, the party went into a conflict with its own leader. Self-Defense's MPs would not like to leave their seats. This party reminds Russia's LDPR, lacking vivid personalities except its leader. The significant difference is the lack of unofficial incomes in Poland. The easiest way to capitalize on an MP's mandate is to acquire a low-interest loan against the rather substantial official salary. Most of Self-Defense's MPs had used exactly this opportunity, and were not going now to pay back beforehand, or to repay the remaining part of the loan against a higher interest.
As a result, Self-Defense's members rushed to the ranks of PiS. The Kaczynskis unexpectedly managed to gain the party without Lepper. It was high time to open the champagne and triumph, but the brothers knew no measure.
On August 30, servicemen of the Domestic Security Agency detained Janusz Kaczmarek, Minister of Interior in Jaroslaw Kaczynski's government. General Konrad Kornatowski and Jaromir Netzel were arrested on the same day. All of them were accused of interference into effectuation of justice and perjury. At the same time, businessman Ryszard Krauze and the earlier discharged Investigation Bureau chief Jaroslaw Mazec were put on the wanted list.
"ARRESTS SHOULD PLEASE NOT THE COURT BUT THE PUBLIC"
On September 2, the state-owned channel of the Polish TV broadcasted a unique multimedia show, having no precedents in global practice. Poland's General Prosecutor Dariusz Barski used the newest available police equipment to provide evidence for his own version of the smearing operation against Vice Prime Minister Andrzej Lepper. This evidence involved intercepted phone talks of various persons; monitoring of their travel across Warsaw, mapped by means of cellular phone signals; records performed by video cameras of the five-star Marriott Hotel in the center of Warsaw; computer modeling of the events in accordance with the version of the investigation.
Dariusz Barski's evidence, broadcasted by the state-run TV, revealed that on July 5 evening, businessman Ryszard Krauze phoned Lech Woszerowicz, an MP from the Self-Defense faction, inviting him to his apartment on the 40th floor of Marriott Hotel. Next morning, this MP surfaced in Lepper's office. Hours before the talk with Woszerowicz, Krauze met with Minister of Interior Janusz Kaczmarek, who was well informed about the operation against Lepper. The contents of the talk in Krauze's apartment and in Lepper's office were unavailable for the prosecution. Not a single court in the world would accept the exposed materials as evidence, as any lawyer is acquainted with the principle that sequence of events alone does not prove their interconnection: "post hoc non est propter hoc".
However, the TV-run effectuation of justice greatly impressed the Polish middleman, which is psychologically understandable. The exposure of the connections between the boss of national police and the top billionaire on the background of the interior of a luxurious apartment, unavailable for an average Pole, not only fascinated the TV audience but also convinced it that the Prime Minister hates the filthy rich and the corruptionists as strongly as any Jan Kowalski from a small village. The election slogan of the Prime Minister's party – "If a person owns a fortune, he must have got it from somewhere" – acquired a tangible substantiation. The show's success was tremendous. According to polls, PiS overcame the 10% lag from the Civil Platform in a matter of three days. The public did not care for the fact that Kaczmarek's arrest was presently recognized illegitimate by the court; that the arrest was carried out without the court's sanction; that the prosecution's ban for Krauze's escape from the country also had to be judicially approved, etc.
In his personal comments over the scandal, Jaroslaw Kaczynski didactically declared that "arrests should please not the courts but the public". This astounding remark was made by a postgraduate of the Warsaw University's Faculty of Law, a Ph.D. of the Institute of Governance and Law of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
THE PRE-ELECTION ALIGNMENT
Unluckily for Jaroslaw Kaczynski, sympathy from the Polish middleman does not guarantee obedience of the political class. Despite PiS's immediate political triumph, the corruption scandal, involving top government officials, provoked disintegration of the ruling coalition. The opposition decided to use the corruption case for their own political advantage, while the former allies understood that the status of an MP does not provide safety. On September 7, the Sejm's majority voted for self-dissolution, scheduling snap elections for October 21.
PiS's major rival in the race is the Civil Platform. This party's founding congress took place on January 24, 2001 in Gdansk. The three founding fathers, Andrzej Olechowski, Maciej Plazynski and Donald Tusk, shared the intention to build up a rightist-liberal alternative to then-dominating leftist-centrist coalition of Alexander Kwasniewski and Marek Pohl. Months later, in September 2001, the Civil Platform garnered 12% in the elections, acquiring 65 seats in the Sejm and the status of the major opposition force.
On June 13, 2004, the Civil Platform became the winner of the Polish elections to the Europarliament, with 15 seats of Poland's 54. Next year, the party gained the second result in the parliamentary and presidential elections, but refused to join the ruling coalition and thus forced the Kaczynski party, PiS, to strike a deal with Self-Defense and the League of Polish Families.
The Civil Platform is supported by the rightist intelligentsia with traditionally conservative views. At present, the party faces two problems – a low activity of the electorate, and absence of a charismatic leader.
The former problem is typical for rightist parties of Eastern Europe. The relatively high incomes of the electorate predetermine a relatively low voting activity, and the election performance of the party falls behind its acceptance by the public, with advantage for the opponents, using populist slogans to attract the "protest electorate".
The latter problem is now acquiring the shape of a romantic melodrama. For a long time, the Civil Platform was torn apart between two contenders for the leading position. The personal rivalry of Donald Tusk and Jan Rokita reflected the traditional competition of their native cities – Gdansk, the birthplace of Solidarnosc Movement, and Krakow, the capital of the intellectuals. The melodramatic effect was introduced by Rokita's wife Nelly, an ethnic German born in Chelyabinsk, Russia. After she was invited by Lech Kaczynski to the post of advisor for women's affairs, she agreed to run from the PiS list. Her husband consequently refused to take part in the race, claiming that a political struggle inside one family is unacceptable. He was gallant enough to explain that his wife had dedicated herself to his political career, and today, he would like to dedicate himself to her own success. Without Jan Rokita, a vivid and original politician, the Civil Platform is going to gain less support than expected.
COALITION OPTIONS
A public poll, conducted on September 11, estimates the potential distribution of seats in the Sejm as follows: PiS – 179, the Civil Platform – 176, Leftists and Democrats (the succession of the Kwasniewskyites) – 68, Self-Defense (unified with the League of Polish Families) – 35. The expected near-draw in the rivalry of PiS and Civil Platform suggests a search of coalition partners. In case a German-type broad coalition is not formed, the preferable partner for any of the two contenders for victory is the alliance of Leftists and Democrats, as the shrunk Self-Defense is hardly able to provide the necessary number of seats for a majority.
A broad coalition is hardly probable, primarily for ideological reasons. PiS and the Civil Platform share a number of priorities, especially the nationalist approach, but PiS's populist slogans are unacceptable for the Civilists, and in case they become junior partners, they are doomed for erosion of their identity and for dire political prospects. The "grand coalition" is therefore possible only in case of a significant advantage of the Civil Platform and an opportunity for overtaking key ministries. In this case, the ascent of the force which never possessed the status of the ruling party would be honorable; in a different case, its commitment for partnership with PiS would be viewed by its electorate as a disgusting kind of compromise. This contradiction is enhanced with a personal problem: during the Presidential elections of 2005, Donald Tusk undertook too harsh personal attacks on his major rival Lech Kaczynski to make their accord possible at present.
The coalition of the Civil Platform and Leftists and Democrats (LiD) also requires serious concessions from each of the sides. The two political forces, sharing dissatisfaction with the rule of the Kaczynski twins, have made certain efforts of rapprochement yet before the current election campaign.
Wojciech Olejniczak, Kwasniewski's successor in the Alliance of Democratic Leftists, was focused in January 2007 on building up a leftist-liberal merger of parties in order to downplay the post-Communist hue of his party. In this effort, he teamed up with Andrzej Olechowski, one of the founding fathers of the Civil Platform.
This effort to transform the leftist ideology in the moderate direction resulted in a demonstrative withdrawal of ex-Prime Minister Leszek Miller from Olejniczak's party, after his name was not included into LiD's election list. Thus, the opposition has got rid of the most odious figure, the former ideological secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party. This makes the coalition of the Leftists and the Civil Platform more probable.
In case the Civil Platform and Leftists and Democrats agree for a coalition, it is going to be headed by Donald Tusk as the potential Prime Minister. But even in case of success of this scenario, the newly-shaped Government is going to face a lot of problems. The Constitution allows President Lech Kaczynski to use the right of veto, which the Sejm will hardly be able to override with two thirds of the vote. Therefore, Poland's political life is going to be stormy.
Number of shows: 1182
ENG 
