Wishful thinking and the beatroot’s ‘PiS-ed off’ index

Do the Sikorski/Dorn resignations mean the government is falling apart? With a lack of anything inspiring in the opposition ranks going on, many are pinning their hopes on it.

The ex-defense minister, Radek Sikorski was never one of the Kaczynski brothers’ closest supporters. When he excepted the defense portfolio he said he was ‘non-aligned’, even though he stood on the Kaczynski brother’s Law and Justice ticket when campaigning to be elected for the Senate, the so-called (snigger) ‘upper house of parliament’.

The ex-interior minister, Ludwik Dorn, on the other hand, was the ‘third twin’; he was loyally ‘on-side’ – a safe pair of hands.

And now Ludwik has gone and spoiled it all (to quote Frank and Nancy Sinatra) and done something stupid: implied that there is a rift deep inside the government.

PiS opponents get excited – not by their inspiring opposition to this government – because there has been none – but maybe, just maybe, PiS will split in two.

As Polish Outlook notes, this is the government opponent’s only hope.

What is remarkable about this bumbling, naive, single issue obsessed government is that they have retained support among their core voters.

Last year I introduced the beatroot’s PiS-ed off index – how much of government supporters have deserted them since the general election of November 2005. In that election PiS gained 27 percent of the vote.

In the latest opinion poll, PiS are receiving 28 percent approval rating. That gives PiS a + 1 pissed off rating. More voters support the government now than they did in the last election.

What that proves, if anything, is that no matter how bad things get for the government, and if they had another election tomorrow, PiS would still be in government, albeit forced into a coalition with their main rivals, the ineffective Civic Platform.

So what all the government’s opponents are hoping for is PiS split in two.

And that’s an indictment of the opposition’s impotence, as much as it is the government’s incompetence.

PiS up

The Law and Justice party convention turned into a victory rally. Not much else, really.

Re-elected leader of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS), Jaroslaw Kaczynskia told the party faithful at the weekend that the government aims to broaden the coalition with the addition of ‘intellectuals’ and promises an all-out attack on the morally corrupt post-communist ‘system’. But he has said all that before – many times.

Jaroslaw, in an ‘impassioned speech’ (meaning, a bit of a rant) let us in on what to expect from the government in the next few weeks and months.

‘We must build a coalition of all those who are guided by common sense[?] and adopt a rational view of Polish realities. It must be a coalition of those who refuse to believe that what is white is in fact black and vice versa, and who don’t dismiss talk of a network of vested interests that mars Poland’s public life’.

ER...right. Black is indeed not white – it’s common sense, innit?

By ‘vested interests’ he is referring to what PiS and other members of the coalition government see as a post-communist network of ex-communists and liberal allies in business, civil service, media and secret services. These people, who got their hands on the post-communist bounty, have, thinks PiS, led to a corrupt and ‘morally sick’ society.

Kaczynski also signaled that he wants to broaden the coalition of PiS, far-right nationalist League of Polish Families and rural, populist, ex-stalinist Self defense by trying to tempt more ‘intellectuals’ and middle class types into a government that many think is chronically short of experience and...well, intelligence.

But how to do that when you have people like Andrzej Lepper and Roman Giertych as vice-prime ministers?

Sociologist Jacek Kucharczyk told Radio Polonia:

‘I didn’t see any specific offer [at the party convention] except for ‘come with us, if you join us you will get a job in the administration because we need people to fill up all the numerous positions of authority within the government.

There was no offer to doctors [who have been staging protests for weeks now over pay], for instance, or other segments of intelligentsia […] So I think this offer is not credible, especially in view of the presence of people like Andrzej Lepper in the government who made his anti-intelligentsia rhetoric part and parcel of his political career.'

Jaroslaw Kaczynski – whose opinion poll ratings have plummeted recently – remains popular with his party. He was re-elected chairman of the party almost unanimously by the 11,000-delegated votes with only 19 against.