WANTING TO BE JUST A LITTLE BIT PREGNANT:

In Polish politics, twins put on a show (Richard Bernstein, 9/30/05, The New York Times )

The two parties that got the most votes in the parliamentary elections, Law and Justice and Civic Platform, both have their roots in the pro-democracy protest movements of the 1980s.

Indeed, Lech Kaczynski was among the thousands detained when the Communist regime declared martial law in 1981.

But they are nonetheless so different in many other respects that many people in Poland doubt they will be able to form an effective coalition.

In essence, Law and Order is in economic matters very much like a standard European social-democratic party, favoring strong state protections and an elaborate welfare system.

But Lech Kaczynski's presidential campaign has mostly stressed the themes of traditional family and religious values while promising an "honest" Poland free of scandals.

Lech Kaczynski attributes recent scandals to the ability of the post-Communists to hijack the democracy revolution and turn it into an old-boy network reminiscent of Communist times.

"We must turn the country around to face its citizens," he said during the campaign. "The scale of the repair will be so great that Poland will become a new republic."

His main opponent for president is Donald Tusk, the candidate of the Civic Platform and, like the Kaczynski brothers, a prominent figure in politics for a quarter of a century in Poland. But unlike Kaczynski, Tusk is an unabashed proponent of what the Europeans call economic liberalism, favoring less regulation, lower taxes, and greater reliance on the free market.

"My nightmare is to follow the path of France and Germany in socioeconomic policy," Jan Rokita, the Civic Platform's candidate for prime minister, said during the parliamentary election campaign, associating Continental Europe's two largest countries with high social spending, low growth and spiraling unemployment.

While Tusk is in the lead in the presidential race, nobody is counting out Kaczynski, not least because his party, Law and Justice, made a late-minute surge in the parliamentary contest, to become the leading party in Parliament.

Most analysts attribute the Law and Justice Party's ability to outscore the Civic Platform in the parliamentary race to its clever exploitation of popular fears of Tusk's free-market philosophy, especially his advocacy of a modified flat-tax system, in which people would pay a 15 percent sales tax and a 15 percent income tax, and there would be a 15 percent corporate tax.

Arguing that such a system would create hardships for poor people, the Law and Justice Party ran television ads showing an open refrigerator with the food in it disappearing and a child's room with no toys.

And in recent days, the gap in the public opinion polls between Kaczynski and Tusk has narrowed. While Tusk at one point held a 20 percentage point lead over Kaczynski, that has shrunk to a mere 3 percentage points.

"Poland awaits radical changes, but not revolutionary changes," Lech Kaczynski said in an interview Thursday in his mayoral office. "My brother uses the term moral revolution. Moral revolution has nothing to do with political revolution."

The danger for the states outside the Anglosphere that recognize the need for reform but fear it is that they will not go nearly far enough to do themselves much good.

MORE:
A Europe of weak leaders (Simon Serfaty, 9/30/05, International Herald Tribune)

The recent elections in Germany confirm a troubling political trend throughout Europe: For the past two years, strong governments have become weak and weak governments have become increasingly weaker. As a result, each head of state or government has been at the mercy of the next national election - first in Spain and Britain, now in Germany and Poland, and next in Italy and France. Denied stable governing majorities, the states of Europe are astray and their citizens angry.

A major consequence of the current political disarray is felt in Brussels where the European Union is facing its most serious challenge in 40 years. The institutional crisis there is not merely structural: It is also a crisis of relevance.

After years of being denied the benefits usually associated with European integration - greater economic prosperity, a sense of national security and an underlying faith in an emerging new identity - citizens attribute their disarray at home to the intrusive institutions that their own governments have relentlessly made responsible for their own insufficiencies.

Helpless, those same citizens turn their attention inward, but their patience is too short to allow reforms to take hold, whatever their sources...

When voters across a wide swathe of democracies mire themselves in the status quo you have to assume it's what they want.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 1, 2005 8:57 AM