Polish First Lady - eco-warrior

Has the First Lady, Maria Kaczynska (she actually is the one on the right of the picture, the beatroot believes) been backseat driving u-turns in government highway development policy?

An interview in a national daily last week, where Mrs President declared that she was not happy about the planned Rospuda bypass (see the previous posts) - “It would be barbarian”, she said - came only days before her brother-in-law, Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, announced that work would be halted on the highway until a local referendum was taken.

But has the (completely unelected) First Lady had an influence on public opinion?

Well, PBS pollsters are reporting today that 65% of Poles are against the bypass.

But the people of Augustow, the town where the bypass would take away choking amounts of traffic and bring economic development to the area, are firmly for the proposal. Eighty one percent said they want the highway.

So it appears Poland’s new eco-warrior is having a limited influence on the inhabitants of Augustow, but maybe is having an influence inside the Polish government.

What a shame that unelected family members of politicians can’t seem to keep their mouths shut. Who does Maria think she is: a 1990s Hilary Clinton?

Jaroslaw Kaczynski breaks arm after falling on ice

Does that make him a lame duck Prime Minister?

AP reports:

Kaczynski [nicknamed ‘the duck’] — the identical twin of President Lech Kaczynski — had the accident Sunday afternoon while he was on his way to attend a Roman Catholic Mass in a chapel at the president's palace, the government spokesman Jan Dziedziczak told TNV24.
Kaczynski received medical treatment and was expected to be able to carry out most of his duties in the coming week because he is right-handed, Dziedziczak said.

It’s good to know you only need one arm to be a Prime Minister...signing things...shaking hands...that kind of thing...

PM Kaczynski keeps a low profile

Photojournalists have been instructed that they are not allowed to take pictures of the Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s profile.
Extraordinary piece of silliness, this one. I mean, we all have our complexes but this is getting ridiculous.

The strange announcement was made at a press conference yesterday where signs forbid snappers getting round to the side of the PM and taking pictures. No reason was given for the strange demand.

The government has long been touchy about the coverage it gets from the media here in Poland. They think it’s bias, and maybe it is. But though Jaroslaw’s ‘profile’ has not been good in the media, I can’t see how a ban on his profile will make that ‘profile’ any better.

The control freakery that the government’s critics have long accused it of has gone to new lengths with the attempt to control what photos are taken of its members.

The ban of profile shots of the PM has not, to my knowledge, been extended to profile shots of the President, which is odd, as identical twins usually have the same profile.

And of course, once you start making odd demands like this one of the media you are just asking for trouble. Profile shots of the PM are now all over the internet. The German blogs seem very impressed by it all, see here [sorry, it's Dutch] and here and here and here and here.

Better out than in?

Or: why the alleged ‘outing’ of Polish politicians is maybe not such a brilliant idea.

Veteran (I hope he doesn’t mind that word) libertarian journalist and gay rights campaigner, Doug Ireland, published an article in Gay City News on Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski this week where he goes straight for the jugular:

Poland’s homophobic Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski — the identical twin brother of Polish President Lech Kaczynski—was outed as a homosexual in major Polish media last week…

Rzeczpolita [Rzeczpospolita?] published documents—some only recently declassified, and some that were leaked—from the files of the Polish Secret Service that discussed Prime Minister Kaczynski’s homosexuality. As part of an investigation, begun in 1992, of right-wing political parties that, the documents said, “could threaten democracy,” a Secret Service department then headed by Colonel Jan Lesiak reported, “It is advisable to establish if Jaroslaw Kaczynski remains in a long-term homosexual relationship and, if so, who his partner is.”

...Then, also last week, former President Lech Walesa repeated on Polish television a crack about the current prime minister’s homosexuality that he had made 13 years before—when, in an interview on the Polish public TV network TVP1, he had said that the Kaczynski twins had come to his birthday party, and that “Lech came with his wife and Jaroslaw came with his husband.”

The rumours about Jaroslaw’s sexuality have been around for along while, of course. But to put the current ‘outing’ in context, Kaczynski is the head of a government which has made some gross homophobic remarks since it came to power last November. His brother, President Lech Kaczynski, when mayor of Warsaw, banned a gay march and called gays ‘perverts’.

So the tactic of gay campaigners here has been to point to the hypocrisy of Kaczynski’s (alleged)...er...position.

When the political is reduced to the personal

I should be honest and say that in July this year Doug Ireland contacted me about the existence of the report by Colonel Jan Lesiak (which as I have showed in a previous post is mostly full of gossip got from reading magazine articles) and asked me how he could get hold of some translated extracts.

I told Doug then that Col Lesiak was a secret service agent during the very oppressive 1980s, when Solidarity leaders were being banged up by Stalinists, and that he was not a good source of information about prominent Solidarity activists like the Kaczynskis.

In fact, for various reasons I didn’t want to get involved in all this – largely on the principle that raking up details of the personal lives of politicians – even hypocritical ones – was not the best way to win political arguments.

But Doug Ireland has contacts with the anti-homophobia movement here and they have been feeding him lots of gossip about the private lives of Polish conservative politicians.

For instance, in the article in Gay City News Doug Ireland quotes gay journalist Michal Rolecki as saying: “…everyone knows that the president and the home secretary regularly visit female brothels.”

Blimey! Does everyone know that? I didn’t, neither does anyone else I have asked about it. Does the president of Poland really sneak into brothels for a quick one now and again? I doubt it.

But as Rolecki says “…you must bear in mind that sex still remains a considerable taboo in Catholic Poland. Some three-quarters of Poles say that that sexuality is a private thing not to be discussed in public. For example, we have never had a sex scandal related to government…”

Actually, there was an expose of the sex lives of Polish politicians published in a book by a journalist who got to sleep with many of them, Anastazja Potocka. The revelations were published about the same time as the initial ‘outing’ of Kaczynski by Walesa. In fact, many think that she was working with Col. Lesiak.

But generally the private lives of politicians are left out of the newspapers. And that is not a particularly Polish, or Catholic thing: in fact most European countries are not like the US, (or the UK, for that matter). There is a separation between public and private.

In the US ‘political arguments’ commonly end up revolving around the grubby activities of drunks like Foley – which of course, is not really a political issue at all.

I do understand that gays and lesbians are using the alleged ‘outing’ of Jaroslaw Kaczynski to bash the government with the same weapon that the government has been bashing them with.

But the best way to challenge homophobia is to restrict the argument to political principles. Gays have as much right to live as they want as heterosexuals do. The issue is about equality and human rights, not what politicians get up to, or don’t get up to, in the privacy of their own bedrooms – or wherever.

Let’s stick to politics and kick the personal out of the political. Otherwise the argument comes down to the behaviour of politicians, and not the principles of Politics.

Kaczynski meets Bush after all

But at one time it looked like he had been snubbed.

News sources reported that according to the Polish schedule released before Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski's arrival in the United States, he was to meet with President Bush mid afternoon – maybe they could share a hamburger? Pierogi? Unfortunately, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said there was no such meeting on Bush's schedule.

Oops!

When this was pointed out to Bush he complained that he was too busy trying do defend his ragged Was on Terror, and hanging on to votes in the mid-term elections in November. And anyway, Condi and Dick were going to meet him.

In the end, George popped his head around the door during a meeting with Cheney and said, “Didn’t I meet you before, last February? I never forget a face!”

He didn’t say that really. He thanked Kaczynski and Poland “for its stead fast support in the war on terror. Thanks. Bye!”

But Jaroslaw barely had time for George, either. Many are commenting that the Polish PM has had an absurdly hectic schedule.

Kaczynski is having meetings and giving speeches and press conferences on missile systems in Poland (and a possible bilateral defense agreement to go with them (or not), Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon – Israel, energy security, Ukraine\s entry into NATO, anti-Semitism in Poland (or not)….

He’s giving a lecture at the Heritage Foundation on ‘Central Europe’. He’s having meetings with Polonia representatives in Chicago.

So many meetings on too many things, surely the prime minister must have a huge team from which to delegate talks? Well, not this prime minister - he seems to be involved in everything. Foreign Office, Embassies are by-passed as Jaro sticks his finger into everything. That’s very much his style.

Professor Zbigniew Lewicki, expert on Polish-US affairs from Warsaw University, told Radio Polonia

'It is, indeed, a very packed schedule. I think there are too many meetings. Usually PMs don't do that. There are people who do that for them. Then the Prime Minister would meet with one or two really important hosts, rather than try to deal with every issue by himself.’

Still, Bush did good in meeting with Jaroslaw, no matter how short. When you snub the Kaczynskis they get upset, and have long memories…

Kaczynski twins on the Jon Stewart Show

Poland’s international PR problem gets ever worse.

See clip of the show on Chris Borowski's Traveling Life blog.

See also Troublesome Twins by Andrew Nagorski in Newsweek.

That’s it from me for a couple of weeks. I’m going on a bit of a Balkans Odyssey so I will have plenty of stories when I get back.

While I am away check our Edward Lucas, Polish Outlook, Our man in Gdansk and the truly extraordinary Being had.

I’ll leave a couple of postcards on P3.

Do zobaczenia

A chip on his shoulder?

What’s so bad about being called a potato?

So the President of Poland doesn’t like being called a kartoffel by German journalists, huh?

Reporters Without Borders is as outraged as this blog that someone should get upset about being called a harmless vegetable.

Reporters Without Borders denounced today as “disgraceful” the Polish government’s “over-reaction” in demanding that Germany apologise for a German newspaper article making fun of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his brother.

From one root vegetable to another – rejoice, Mr. President! It could have been worse. They could have called you a burak!


Vegetables of the world unite!