Is Poland the new UK?

You could forgive those poor old hapless Eurocrats on the EU Commission for thinking so.

It used to be Maggie Thatcher who wound up Brussels, insisting on a single currency opt out and many other intransigent demands.

The slightly batty old ‘iron handbag’s’ catch phrase when dealing with the EU was simply, “No, no, no…”

Well, now it’s Warsaw getting the ‘trouble maker’ tag. The Russian veto over the Polish-Russian meat wars (‘Nie, nie, nie!) is only the latest in a long line of stubborness from the Poles. EU Observer reminds us that:

In the past 12 months Poland's cry of "solidarity" [from Brussels to the other new EU members] has erupted over labour market access, the services directive, a German-Russian gas pipeline and the Schengen zone. Its budget deficit is breaking EU rules. Its plan to hold a referendum on eurozone entry is unpopular and in January it alone vetoed VAT reforms.

Tusk, tusk. Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski said this week that he doesn’t envisage a referendum on the single currency till 2011. Brussels bit back by saying that Poland’s budget deficit will be 4% in 2007 one percent above the magic 3% that is stipulated in the sexy sounding Growth and Stability pact, which tries to keep high spending governments in line (and there is a long line of those).

But having Poland as the bad boy only partially deflects criticism from Brussels itself – which, since people in Holland and France told it where to stick its silly ‘EU Constitution’, hasn’t known what to do with itself. Now its only relevance, apparently, is to lecture Poland (and now Turkey) on what democracy looks like (quite forgetting that you cannot impose democracy).

Maybe Brussels should take a good hard look in the mirror a bit more often, and democratize itself.

Another PR disaster for LPR…

Maciej Giertych’s assistant joins in the fun at neo-nazi party.

dziennik.pl reports film evidence of a neo-nazi party (that’s having a good time ‘party’, but maybe not only) two years ago in Silesia, with lots of drinking, cries of ‘Sieg Heil’ and burning swastikas etc, attended by members of the All-Polish Youth (Młodzieży Wszechpolska), the Giertych-jungen of the League of Polish Families (LPR).

It gets worse. Spotted at the neo-nazi knees-up was a female assistant of Maciej Giertych, Euro MP and senior member of LPR.

Holding nazi type gatherings is illegal in Poland under article 256 of the penal code.

Leader of LPR, Roman Giertych (and former president of Młodzieży Wszechpolska), denies any knowledge of the matter and says that any perpetrator of improper behaviour must be punished – ‘and that includes All Polish Youth.”

In July this year, the editor of Zielony Sztandar printed an apology for accusations that All Polish Youth were fascist sloganizers, promoting violence and criminal activity. I bet he wishes he had to stuck to his guns.

Don’t forget to support All-Polish Youth’s jolly web site in English. It has comment boxes like a blog, so I am sure they will be glad to hear what you think.

More?
Right-wing Polish European Parliament lawmaker dismisses aide after neo-Nazi rally video, IHT, Nov 30

A new Cold War?

Economist correspondent on Poland and eastern Europe, Edward Lucas, pops up in the Times (London) where his opening three sentences are:

‘How was Litvinenko murdered? We don’t know yet; we may never find out, but what is clear is his death marks the start of a new Cold War. The question is: how to win it?’

But surely, if we ‘don’t know yet’ what happened, and ‘may never find out’, then how on earth can we deduce that the murder ‘marks the start of a new Cold War’? Some confusion here, me thinks.

What we do know is that much of the western media has responded to the radioactive murder in London as Edward has done. The British government is being careful, but a New Labour minister broke ranks at the weekend and said what they really think by laying into Putin’s (admittedly loathsome) human rights record. This is a battle of good versus evil, we are told, and President Putin is on the side of the baddies and Litvinenko on our side, the side of the goodies. And this all adds up to a ‘new Cold war’.

But let’s be realistic: Litvinenko was, like Putin, a member of the KGB. The KGB was a nasty organization. Litvinenko was no knight in shining amour. He wasn’t even a dirty angel. He did bad things too.

And at a time when Russia is trying to form new agreements with Britain over energy supplies why would Putin start murdering people in the middle of the UK capital?

But more importantly, we should also be realistic in admitting that the relationship between Russia and the rest of the world is most defiantly not a new ‘Cold War’.

In the Times article, Edward reminds us that there are lots of conflicts going on between Russia and countries that were unfortunately imprisoned in the old communist bloc, such as Georgia, Ukraine and Poland. Most of these disputes are over oil and gas supply, which Moscow does have a strong influence over. Putin (who, remember, has an approval rating in Russia of about 80%) can turn off the taps; the Big Bad Bear can force them into new agreements (for a start, it can make Belarus or Ukraine pay the market rate for gas anytime it likes – at the moment they are getting cut price Russian gas because pipelines go through there territory).

But do these trade disputes add up to a new ‘Cold War’? To think that they do confuses what the old Cold War was really like – a struggle over land, territory, influence, and most importantly, ideology.

Russia is not trying to force its Dickensian capitalism on Poland. There are no threats to invade Warsaw. Tanks are not on the borders. Polish school kids are no longer forced to learn Russian.

So why are western (and many Polish) journalists equating two completely different situations?

Brendan O’Neill in Spiked may have a point when he writes:

‘What is really motivating this reversion to Cold War rhetoric is not any clear evidence of Putin’s involvement in Litvinenko’s murder, or the reality of the ‘Russian threat’ (let’s not forget that the real Cold War involved a global stand-off between two nuclear-armed superpowers; the occasional killing of spies was only a small part of that stand-off). Rather, it is a transparent and cynical attempt to give a shot to Western politics itself.’

When the real Cold War did end western politicians were left without an enemy with which do justify their own existence. Politics has become more and more meaningless and the political class more and more isolated from its people. The last 16 years have been a search for ‘meaning’. Who are the new bad guys?

Well, they have found al-Qaeda; and now they have found a new ‘Russian threat’ – even though we have little or no evidence that al-Qaeda is capable of ‘threatening our way of life’, or that Putin is sending guys over to London to slip some polonium in someone’s sushi.

Time to calm down a little.

Gronkiewicz-Waltz wins

21.00 CET: Exit poll results of the second round of the mayoral elections in Poland indicate a win for the opposition candidate in Warsaw.

Former President of the National Bank, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz of Civic Platform (53.6%) beat incumbent mayor and ex-Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz (46.4%) of the ruling Law and Justice party.

That's a better result than was expected over the last few days. Hanna had been losing support in the opinion polls.

Marcinkiewicz was kicked out of his Prime Minister post earlier this year to secure Warsaw for the government. Didn't work. How long will he remain with the government now? It's known he has differences with the Kaczynskis. He has just given a little speech saying the usual thank yous and that he is now 'unemployed'. The gossip is that he might get either a very nice little earner as head of Poland’s oil giant, Orlen, or re-enter government as Foreign Minister. But maybe a move to the UK, Kazimierz?

Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski just said on TVP that the government’s support, nationally, held up well in the countryside but their campaign didn’t really take off in the cities. Natch…He also is surprised that Marcinkiewicz lost. But the fact is that if the Civic Platform can’t beat the government at the moment in the capital then they may as well not get up in the morning.

Hungover election official delays Polish exit poll

Turned on the television at 8 O’clock to see the exit poll result for the Warsaw mayor election.

Unfortunately, one election official got so drunk Saturday night that she failed to drag herself out of bed to open the balloting station. She is now helping police with their enquiries. So all voting places are open for one extra hour, folks!

Police were also called to a polling station today after a man showed up to vote accompanied by his pet goat (which wasn’t registered to vote).

In Krakow we do have some results. Mayor Jacek Majchrowski (who got 42% of the vote in the first round) beat government candidate Ryszard Terlecki by 50% to 40%. Last week Jan Rokita from opposition Civic Platform gave Terlecki his support, much to the outrage of many Platform supporters. This probably turned out to be a kiss of death.

Very nice?

Liberals start to turn against Borat.

It seems the Borat character, initially welcomed by US and UK liberals as he made them feel all superior to those pesky rednecks, are starting to get uncomfortable about their own laughter.

The film is on general release in Poland from this weekend. See 'Borat and the Polish connection' here.

What’s the Russian beef with Polish meat?

Poland vetoes Russian-EU deal because Moscow maintains a ban on importing Polish food products.

The Polish-Russian meat war is the latest in a long line of post-Cold War conflicts between the two countries. Relations are as rancid as rotting chicken. Moscow banned the import of Polish food products last year, claiming that Polish vetenary standards are poor and Warsaw is doing little to stop cross border meat smuggling. Poland, and the EU, say that food health standards have ‘improved’ and the meat ban should get the chop.

So relations are frosty to Poland’s east, but they are not too warm on the western border, either. The German government coordinator for German-Russian relations said of Poland vetoing a special cooperation pact between Russia and the EU at the current Helsinki Summit this week:

"The Polish leadership is acting against Russia with a high degree of irrationality. Poland could better carry through its interests within the framework of the European Union."

There looks like there will be a compromise on both sides, but not soon enough to save the doomed Helsinki Summit.

But there is another reason why Polish government members should be nice to Russia. One of Moscow’s most successful exports seems to be radioactive poisons. If I were the Kaczynski brothers I would be taking a second look at what’s on their weekend pork cutlet, remembering that the name of the substance that killed Alexander Litvinenko in London is Polonium 210, named after the country of birth of Polish scientist Marie Sklodowska Curie.

Will Hanna blow it?

The second round of the Mayor of Warsaw election looks too close to call.

Much of the campaign leading up to the second round of the mayoral elections this Sunday had to be cancelled after the 23 deaths down a Ruda Slaska mine on Tuesday.

The election silence hasn’t done government candidates any harm. The opinion polls in the race for Warsaw Town Hall show Law and Justice’s (PiS) candidate Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz and Civic Platform’s (PO) Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz neck and neck. After the first round two weeks ago Gronkiewicz-Waltz had a ten point lead. But she had been hemorrhaging support ever since. In fact, in one poll published in Gazeta Wyborcza she was actually behind by two percentage points.

If Platform can’t even win the Mayor of Warsaw election tomorrow it will be a damning indictment of their opposition (or lack of it) to the present government, whose reign in office over the last 12 months has little to show for it, except the chaos of endless coalition building.

There is a daily newspaper in Warsaw which gives awards for the ‘Best Law of the Year’ every December. Such is the lack of any significant lawmaking by the present ‘law makers’ that I can ‘reveal’ that the editors are having trouble coming up with good enough laws to give awards to.

So you would think that Civic Platform would be crawling all over such a weak government and would be winning mayoral elections easily – especially in the capital.

Incumbent mayors have a real advantage in Poland, for some reason, and are very hard to dislodge. So Marcinkiewicz, the current mayor, has that advantage. But if Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz doesn’t win tomorrow then Platform election headquarters will be a very gloomy place to be indeed. But it will be their own fault.

No survivors in mining tragedy

23 dead in Tuesday’s gas explosion in the Halemba mine in Ruda Slaska, southern Poland.

It was a build of methane gas that set off the explosion, 1000 meters below ground. Shocking, of course, but unfortunately not that shocking. Around 20 miners die a year in Polish coalmines. Collieries measure acceptability of the death rate by measuring one death by tonnage of coal mined.

Twenty deaths a year is bad but during communism around 150 people were killed a year in this way.

The recent chronology of the worst mining accidents in Poland looks like this:

2002: 10 miners killed in a coal dust explosion in the Jas-Mos mine in Jastrzebie Zdroj.

1998: 6 miners with damaged oxygen masks asphyxiated after being sent into a shuttered shaft in violation of security regulations at the Niwka-Modrzejow mine in Sosnowiec.

1991: 5 killed in cave-in at Halemba mine in Ruda Slaska.

1990: 19 killed in methane gas explosion at the Halemba mine in Ruda Slaska.

1987: 19 miners killed in coal dust explosion at Myslowice mine in the town on Myslowice.

1979: 34 killed in coal dust explosion at the Dymitrow mine in Bytom.

1974: 34 killed in coal dust explosion at the Silesia coal mine in Czechowice-Dziedzice.

Kuwait daze

There is a Polish trade fair going on in Kuwait at the moment.

Polish government wants to increase ‘cultural contacts’ apparently - though I imagine the location of the principality (not really a country, is it?), sitting on top of a great big lake of oil, makes Kuwait a ‘strategic’ area where everyone wants to increase ‘cultural contacts’.

I met someone who just came from covering the Polish trade fair. He was saying that cigarettes are a dollar a pack (no tax!) and petrol is less than a dollar a gallon.

In the middle of telling us all this stuff, he sidetracked into a little story about when he was in Frankfurt airport. In the departure lounge was a heavily bearded, mullah type Muslim guy praying on his mat, as he waited for the same plane to Kuwait.

Everyone in the room with me who was listening to this story said, “Yeah, ‘they’ do it on purpose to intimidate people…” Everyone nodded, knowingly.

But do they do it to ‘intimidate’? I thought that if they are devout then they have to pray at certain times. How could people possibly know he was trying to intimidate people? I opened my mouth to correct what is just a rather disturbing prejudice…but in the end, I just couldn’t be bothered.

So I thought I would tell you about it, instead. Very worrying. And it’s going to get worse…

All is not well on the Platform

After Civic Platform’s (PO) leading dandy, Jan Rokita, gave his support to Law and Justice candidate in the second round of the election for Mayor of Krakow (taking place this Sunday) talk of splits within the opposition are rife. No surprise, really.

Rokita is backing historian Ryszard Terlecki, the Law and Justice (PiS) candidate, because is a ‘good guy’ and someone he knows as a fellow Krakovian from the old days of knocking around at the Jagiellonian University. It was either that or back the popular leftist candidate and incumbent mayor Jacek Majchrowski (who got 42% of the vote in the first round).

Some members of PO - whose own candidate came third, and is disqualified from the second round - are outraged by this treachery. Leader of PO Donald Tusk is publicly trying to calm things down, emphasizing that all hands should be on deck pulling together to get Law and Justice out of local government. Behind closed doors, however, you can imagine the screaming match going between Platform’s two main political figures.

In a way though, this division between Tusk and Rokita has always been there, waiting to come to the surface.

Rokita has always been a reluctant member of Civic Platform. When it formed in 2000 Rokita didn’t initially join. He was a member of the Conservative People's Party (SKL), a right wing offshoot of the Freedom Union, the most liberal of the parties to emerge from the Solidarity trade union. He only threw his (extravergant) hat into the ring with Platform when he saw much of the membership of SKL drift over to the new party.

But the ideological differences remained. Rokita is a freemarket conservative, much in the same way as Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz is. Tusk is on the more liberal wing of the party.

So Platform – like all Polish political parties – is a split waiting to happen.

How this will affect the second round of elections on Sunday where PO has a candidate is unclear, although voters don’t usually like parties with obvious internal divisions. What’s certain though is that the race of Mayor of Krakow is going to be a tight one.

Teamwork in lazy UK

Despite the negative campaign against central Europe immigrants in Britain by some of the media, Poles still have a good enough reputation as far as working hard goes.

As you can see by this photo sent to me from Britain...

Holocaust education is child’s play

Is building a 400 square metre replica of the Warsaw Ghetto out of 50,000 Lego bricks ‘offensive’?

It had a wall around it. Built with bricks. The ghetto was made up of interconnecting parts. Get it? Er...well, not really. But offensive? Dan Sieradski certainly thinks so at the blog Jewschool.com.

“When I think about the senseless slaughter of 10,000,000 innocent Jews, Roma, queers, political dissidents and other undesirables, I think Lego …[sarcasm] …It makes me ill to see people trivializing the Shoah in the name of commemorating it.”

The model made of children’s building bricks was part of a history workshop on November 5 at the Alex Aidekman campus of the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest, New Jersey, US.

Lego bricks have been involved in Shoah controversies before. In 2002, Polish-born artist Zbigniew Libera’s Lego Concentration Camp Set (pictured above) a collection of seven empty boxes bearing pictures of death camps fashioned out of kiddie’s construction materials caused a small outrage. Menachem Rosensaft, founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, said that the show was “in excremental taste” and that “there can be no excuse, aesthetic or otherwise, for the crude desecration of the Holocaust inherent in the display.”

Dan at Jewshcool.com thinks that at least the Libera piece had some artistic merit – kind of - the new Warsaw Ghetto construction, he says, does not:

'Say what you will about Zbigniew Libera’s LEGO concentration camp... It at least is presented in a context which gives way to discussion, whether on the position of the Holocaust in popular culture, the marketing of violence to youth, or even the participation of mainstream German corporations (the proprietors of popular household brand names) in the Shoah. It’s supposed to be controversial.

Six year-olds reconstructing the Warsaw Ghetto with LEGO as an educational activity? That’s senseless and tasteless.'

But is Dan just being silly? Lego is a material kids relate too (and education must be ‘accessible’ nowadays, remember); any education about the Warsaw Ghetto is welcome; surly the material the exhibition is made out of is …well, immaterial? And why has left-liberal ‘identity politics’ made some people so hypersensitive to being ‘offended?

More?

What were they thinking?, New Jersey Jewish Standard, Nov 10

And if the need for education about this subject is still in doubt then see Muslim leader sent funds to Irving, Guardian, November 18. But do young Muslims play with Lego? Perhaps they should…

What the….?

We in Europe see CNN International, a very good, high quality 24 hours news channel...

What we don’t see, too much, is the CNN that Americans see.

I could not resist this: Keith Ellison just got elected as the first Muslim in the US Congress. Lots of interesting stuff to talk about there, of course.

Unfortunately, CNN’s Glenn Beck doesn’t rise to the challenge.

See CNN video here. It’s unbelievable.

Poland’s next president? - now with English subtitles!

His name is Krzysztof Kononowicz, He wears nice jumpers.

One of the stranger candidates in the recent first round of local elections was Mr Kononowicz, an independent candidate standing in the mayor elections in Podlasie, in the northeast.

His policies were not what attracted the 2.5 million visitors to his web site (election videos here with English subtitles) as he didn’t really have any: he spends most of the time rambling on about everything and nothing, much like you hear people moaning on the bus. Funny thing is that he has taken the trouble to write all this nonsense out, and does his best to project his message. He is like the UKs Tony Blair: image, image, image...

In the end, though, the 'tipping point' of his personality cult for the electorate must have been his jumpers – one of which he later sold on the internet for 200 zloty (50 Euro).

Psephologists are currently chewing over his successful campaign (he got nearly 2% of the vote). Everyone is talking about how he is showing established politicians how to campaign on the net.

For sure, Krzysztof has great charisma, but the interest in him is surly because he is an ‘anti-politics' candidate; voting for guys like him is like sticking a finger up at a much loathed political class in Poland. It's also a vote for the traditional craft of Polish jumper making.

Wojciech Wierzejski gets 'bludgeoned' in election

I have never known an electoral humiliation that brought such pleasure.

League of Polish Families representative in the Mayor of Warsaw election, Wojtek Wierzejski, got 0.3% of the vote(according to opinion polls).

Everyone has their own reason for disliking this person. Mine is when he said that ‘deviants’ such as gays (and including me and my girlfreind) who want to demonstrate in the streets of the capital (last summer) ‘should be bludgeoned’.

I honestly cannot remember a politician so brazenly inciting violence.

On the television yesterday, Wierzejski was trying to laugh off the 0.3 embarrassment by saying that voters obviously liked him as a member of parliament but did not see him sitting in Town Hall.

But I think he is in ‘denial’. As polishpolitics.com quotes from Wierzejski’s ‘blog’ (I think it’s an attempt to make us believe he can read and write) he wrote about a trip to the television studio when he thought he was being discriminated against because he didn’t have much support in Warsaw.

“Just after arriving I was told that I would not be on with Gronkiewicz-Waltz, Borowski and Marcinkiewicz [the main contenders], but on another program - with “less likely” candidates, for example with the dude in the orange hat from “the Committee for Gnomes and Idiots”. Real funny public television! I submitted a written protest and left.”

Shame then that Wierzejski got a minute 0.3% of the vote in Warsaw – the dude in the orange hat from “the Committee for Gnomes and Idiots” got 0.5%.

When a politician gets less votes than a gnome or an idiot, it’s time to consider a change of career.

UK nuclear attack?

Why are the British authorities scaring the hell out of the Brits?

This morning in the Guardian we have the headline Al-Qaida plotting nuclear attack on UK, officials warn…

This follows unprecedented remarks by head of MI5 last week who said that there were at least ‘30 active plots to attack Britain’, including nuclear attack.

How do they know that some evil mastermind is plotting to nuke London? “An awful lot of chatter" on jihadi websites, apparently, expressing the desire to acquire chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons.

‘An awful lot of chatter’ is not enough reason to scare Brits witless in this way. I mean, what can ordinary Londoners do about such a ‘threat’? Maybe we should be alert for Muslims carrying large bundles of uranium on public transport?

I can only imagine that the government will be unveiling more restrictive laws in the coming days, and that MI5 wants an increase in funding. Whatever, this is an irresponsible way for the UK authorities to carry on. All it is doing is further ratcheting up the fear.

Those illusive CIA prisons in Poland

Council of Europe couldn’t find ‘em; Euro parliamentarians can’t find ‘em, either. No smoking gun, no torturer’s rope, no Polish version of Lindsay England.

Euro MEPs are annoyed. A press statement last Friday by the European Parliament, made at the end of a three day visit to Poland by one of the EP’s crack team of investigators says:

The head of the delegation, Carlos Coelho thanked the journalists, NGO representatives, intelligence and airport officials who had agreed to meet them. "I regret, however," he said, "the fact that political authorities from the Polish government and Parliament were not as kind: some government members rejected the invitation, others initially accepted to see us and later refused to come [this includes Defense Minister Radek Sikorski]. Finally, there were some high officials were willing to meet us but they never got permission from their superiors."

Busy with the local elections, I think. The team did meet up, however, with the principle players in the supposed intrigue.

Among those who did agree to meet MEPs were the former head of the Foreign Intelligence Agency Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, the former and current chairmen of the board of Szymany airport – Jerzy Kos and Jaroslaw Jurczenko.

When the original story broke last November, the EU Justice Minister threatened to cut off Polish voting rights (during ministerial meetings) if any torture prisons were found on Polish soil. But as I have pointed out many times, the evidence against Poland on this is as weak and wobbley as a just-born baby horse's legs.

Hopefully the EU will come to the same conclusion as I have: Polish CIA torture prisons are a bit like Saddam Hussein’s WMD. The EU investigating team is like a blind man, in a dark room, looking for a black cat, that isn’t there…

Polish local elections - round 1 - Updates

20.00 hrs …Warsaw mayoral election exit poll…Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz (PiS) 36.7%…Hanna Gronkiewicz – Waltz 36.5%... Marek Borowski …22.4%.....

Another opinion polls is giving Marcinkiewicz 38 percent and Waltz 36 percent.

A really terrible result in Warsaw for Wojciech Wierzejski (LPR) who got a sad 0.3 percent.

There are many opinion poll companies releasing results tonight, so be prepared for the odd strange one.

Here's one: In the Warsaw Council as a whole, Civic Platform 32%, Law and Justice 17% and Left got 11%...

If these results are correct then Hanna Gronkiewicz - Waltz will be the next Mayor of Warsaw in the second round in two weeks time, for sure.. Borowski's vote is the big surprise. It seems the arguments between Platform and Law and Justice are getting on people's nerves...

20:17 No opinion poll results yet for nationwide elections but some cities are coming in. The Left are doing better than expected all over the country. In Lodz they got 22 percent; in Krakow they got 44 percent (although the candidate is a very well-known and seemingly much loved character. In Wroclaw the independant candidate got 89 percent!!!

20:30 A pattern is emerging where independent candidates and the Left are doing better than expected in urban areas. Platform is doing well too. But it seems people are very pissed off with the spat between the rightwing Law and Justice and Civic Platform.

In Poznan the Independent candidate got 35% and Civic Platform 34%. In Bialystok Platform 48% Law and Justice 32%...

Next question is....how well are League and Self defense candidates doing?

20:37 One thought – this is me sitting in front of the television here – if things keep going like they are then the two minority parties in the coalition are getting screwed badly in local elections. That means that they are not going to be causing trouble for the government. That means no elections anytime soon, folks…

20:53 1 in 4 who voted for Civic Platform in the General Election in 2005 (in Warsaw) voted for Left candidate Marek Borowski this time! These are secular voters pissed off with the performance in opposition by free market Donald Tusk and friends. That’s bad news for Tusk, of course, but it’s also bad news for the government. Pissed off right wing Platform voters are willing to vote for ex-communists to get rid of Law and Justice.

21:05 As MIGG has just commented, the Warsaw LPR candidate, Wierzejski, got less votes than the beatroot’s candidate Waldemar Frydrych. In fact, the candidate sympathetic to gnomes and dwarfs got 0.2% more votes than our friend from LPR! That means that gnomes and dwarfs have more right to be in the government than he has.

21:19 It seems that the independant candidate in Wroclaw who got an incredible 89% was nominated by both the main political parties. So he had no opposition. Why, I don't understand.

So, with all kinds of opinion poll results coming in (too much!) they are reporting on TVN 24 that in Warsaw Council we have PO 43%, PiS 30%, L 17% and LPR 2.3%....Good night.

No taxation without representation!

Who should ex-pats vote for in the Polish local elections this Sunday?

Since the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 foreigners with an EU passport can vote in municipal and European elections anywhere they are resident. So you would think that the government, and media aimed at foreigners resident in Poland, would be overflowing with especially tailored information about the Polish local elections, the first round of which takes place on Sunday.

In fact, the opposite is the case. Despite contributing to the local taxes that pay for the (sometimes non existent) services it’s as if the ex-pat is an unwanted guest at the Polish ballot box. The government web site on the municipal elections is dreadful. And when foreign media have covered it, they mostly don’t even bother to mention that we can be involved too (no surprise that as the English language media in Poland is generally worse than useless).

In Warsaw, two candidates have a chance of winning the mayoral election – ex-Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz of the ruling Law and Justice party, and ex-head of the Central bank, Hanna Gronkiewicz Waltz (of the main opposition Civic Platform). In third place will be ex-communist Marek Borowski (in an alliance of left wing parties). Unless one candidate gets over 50% of the vote – which is unlikely – then the contest goes to a second round in two weeks time when the top two candidates go head-to-head. As most of Borowski’s votes will go to Gronkiewicz-Waltz then she is favourite to become mayor.

So who will I vote for? Well, sorry, but all the candidates’ politics are so alien to me that I am not going to bother. Although I am tempted by one of them.

There is an alternative – it’s orange

During the Martial Law period, 1981-2, strange graffiti, drawings of gnomes wearing orange hats, began to appear on the walls of buildings. The artists were from the Orange Alternative, headed by Waldemar Fydrych, known to his friends as ‘the Major”. Whereas Solidarity thought it could whip the communists by strike action, Fydrych decided he would lampoon, mock and humiliate the communists out of power.

His method of protest was based on the Situationists of Paris 1968 (‘under the pavement the beach!’). His supporters would roam the streets handing out tampons to women (sanitary towels, like everything else, were in short supply in those dark days); Frydrych also had, and has, a thing about gnomes and dwarfs, which for some reason have an association with freedom for him. He once said: “Can you treat a police officer seriously, when he is asking you the question: 'Why did you participate in an illegal meeting of dwarfs?" But arrest him they did. Many times. Gnomes, dwarfs and elves, were subversive for the Polish communist. That’s how sad, insecure and pathetic they were.

Since gnome-power brought communism to its knees, he has stood in a few elections since 1989 and now he wants to be Mayor of Warsaw. And if the quality of the other candidates is anything to go by then I see no reason why a pro-dwarfist shouldn’t get the top job.

Other candidates taking part in the Warsaw Mayor election are:

Włodzimierz Całka (independent)

Marek Czarnecki (Self defense)

Janusz Korwin-Mikke (conservative, free market, monarchist weirdo independent)

Wanda Nowicka (independent, feminist)

Wojciech Wierzejski (League of Polish Families)

We will be blogging from 20.00 CET Sunday night when the exit poll results of the first round of the nationwide local elections are released. See you then.