The Presidential Election in Poland

Polska jest najwazniejsza or "Poland is the Most Important". Clearly one potential voter is not impressed.

Poland voted for a new president last night and defacing posters is not that common in Krakow-except when it comes to Jaroslaw Kaczynski's poster which has been repeatedly sprayed with 'Spieprzaj Dziadu'.

This phrase comes from the time when Kaczynski was canvassing for votes in Glasgow and was told to "Get Lost Grandad" by a young Pole who had emigrated with his feet when the 2007 PiS led regime came to power.This does not necessarily represent a disrespect for older Poles or pensioners blamed for continually voting for the Kaczynski Twins.

Though defacing posters is one thing, graffiti is not a legitimate way of making ones point known ( unless paid by US NGO's in Belarus to undermine Bat'ka or Lukashenko, then it's heroic, youthful and dissident activity of course and not mere vandalism ).

Just that his attempt to be the 'Caring Father of the Nation' was a fraudulent political act, espousing far right demagoguery and promises of greater 'social security' that seldom materialised.

Most professional younger Poles detest the Kaczynskis, many were opposed to Lech's internment in the Wawel Castle and some resent the Church for having allowed the Wawel crypt to be used to bury him there.

This does not mean younger Poles are "unpatriotic", the slur made by Kaczynski when faced with the greater scale of migration after 2007 when they led a coalition of imebecelic populists including Roman Giertych's League of Polish Families.

What was irritating for Poles, especially those born just before the events of 1980 and Solidarity, is that the Kaczynski's kept pandering to a fanatical scapegoating of even erstwhile Solidarity allies like Walesa as crypto-Communists.

Roman Giertych, the education minister, attempted to take Joseph Conrad off the school syllabus because he had "betrayed Poland" by migrating and writing in English. No matter that he had brought Polish literary genius to the world.

Also struck off the syllabus was Gombrowicz and any other "risque" influence seen to corrupt Catholic children. That and the influence of Samabroona's permatanned Andzej Lepper was seen as a global embarassment for Poland.

The humiliation of Poland kept coming. The Kaczynski's were compared by a German newspapers to potatoes, the twins accused the British TV series the Teletubbies of promoting homosexuality and indulged in witch hunting for Commies.

Yet, despite all this idiocy, the reason why many older Poles voted for Kaczynski was not simply a generation gap. There were real problems with corruption within the SLD which preceded the PiS administration.

Kaczynski did try to do something to clean up corruption and both of them were , to be fair, never corrupt. They were conviction politicians but their "convictions" were fanatical and Poland was imbued with destructive in-fighting.

The IPM, the Institute of National Remembrance, was used to dig up dirt not to imprison Communists of the PZPR who really had committed crimes but those who the Twins just disliked for personal reasons like Agent Bolek- i.e Lech Walesa.

For younger Poles, more cosmopolitan and looking forward to being Europeans, these reactionaries were like embarrassing in-laws. Lech simpered like a kremowka eating little boy on a Sunday afternoon with the Good Catholic Ladies.

That was the image of innocence they sought to project: pure intentions against a nest of evil Fifth Columnists trying to destroy and demoralise the integrity of the Polish nation. But their McCarthyite policies made politics into a bad panto.

At the 2010 Presidential elections, the surviving twin Jarek Kaczynski simply has the phrase "Poland is the Most Important". Even by political standards this is uninspirational and dull.

Yet in Churches, the message has been from Priests that Poles ought to vote wisely and well. In one in Krakow, a computer programmer told me the Priest said and remember "Poland is the Most Important". How subtle.

Dressed in black, Jarek is counting on the martyrdom of his brother in trying to get to Katyn back in April. Many have unfairly blamed Lech for demanding the plane ignore international aviation rules to get to Smolensk on time.

There is no evidence for that.

Clearly, Lech Kaczynski wanted to make his statement three days after PM Donald Tusk. Yet the message was actually one far more conciliatory with Russia than had been expected from an inveterate Russophobe.

There was intervention in the cockpit by military figures who clearly expected that the pilot should ignore the warnings on April 10 2010 not to land and to divert to Minsk in Belarus or to land even in Moscow.

The unspoken assumption might have been that this would be a "national humiliation". So they took a terrible gamble and risked the lives of all those on board who subsequently perished.

What was disgraceful was that Putin was conciliatory about the crash, admitted Katyn was a crime committed by Stalin, a move welcomed by historians like Norman Davies. But it was never going to be enough.

With the blame lying with the pilot, Polish politicians had to reignite enmities by claiming that specialist Russia commandos had robbed certain bodies on the ground. In fact, it had been badly paid regular soldiers who stole credit cards.

Russia denied their highly professional units would have done that because Warsaw got their facts wrong: something that can hardly be blamed on PiSite politicians. It's just no matter what Russia could do it must always be wrong.

Such accusations did nothing diplomatic to heal the divisions between Poland. If anything they were designed to ramp up the Great Game played between Poland, a nation categorised by Edward Lucas as the staunchest "New Cold Warrior" nation.

Instead of turning that issue into a diplomatic spat, the Polish elite in Warsaw could have made a dignified complaint whilst hedging it with a more general appreciation of Putin's conciliatory comments.

But, of course, Russia is portrayed by certain members of the Polish elite as essentially a semi-Oriental horde of barbarians. Edward Lucas cites Alexandr Blok's 1918 poem the Sycthians to ram home that point in The New Cold War.

With the PO set to be the new dominant party in Poland, the agenda will shift to more subtle diplomacy provided by those like Radek Sikorski, a highly educated, highly intellectual politician and diplomat.

As far as possessing gravitas, a certain sense of wit and panache, he cuts a far better figureon the international stage and sought to go for the position of President but was beaten by the more mundane Komorowski.

Yet Sikorski is a wasted talent who buys into the myth of the New Cold War whilst being intelligent enough to know that the New Cold War is really a struggle over resources devoid of ideology-at least on the Russian side.

Radek Sikorski is a wasted talent. As a figurehead for Poland he could have restored its international standing and he had a patrician contempt for the peasant like Kacyznski Twins. By identifying with the neoconservatives he blew all that.

When dealing with the Communist legacy in Polish politics, Sikorski realises it really is time to move on and address the pressing concerns of the real world now and not wallow in a maudlin Eternal Martyr pose.

When Sikorski compared the burial of Lech Kaczynski in the Wawel he tried to draw a line under the past by comparing in to the funeral of the Queen Mother in Britain: like World War Two, the struggle against Communism is history.

But not quite. The "public diplomacy" Poles are meant to identify with now is that Communism has a kind of after life and has been incorporated into aspects of Putin's hybrid regime of market capitalism and Soviet socialism.

In fact, the stress on the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, the certain revision of Russian textbooks for children is all of a piece to create an aura of Putin being the successor to strong leaders who can lead Russia into the 21st century.

Yet despite valid concerns about human rights in Russia, the fact is that Putin is a leader and has to select various aspects of Russian history that people will be motivated and encouraged by.

Time and time again Putin has denounced Stalin but tried to spin the achievements of the Soviet Union as being ones Russians can be proud of because there really does not seem to be much else he could do.

Openness of the historical archives is certainly one thing that Putin should never have tried to rescind. Yet in the USA few even bother to care or know about their recent history. Propaganda is simply more sophisticated there.

It means that by the time state secrets are available, the media in the USA has moved on. So there is no discussion of the nasty elements of US foreign policy in Central America, though dissenters like Chomsky keep pointing to them.

Yet few would expect Barack Obama, with a few token mentions of the history of black slavery, despite the fact his father was actually Kenyan, to make continual abject apologies for US crimes.

That is what is being continually demanded on Russia by ideologues like Edward Lucas, whose The New Cold War has been given an award by none other than Sikorski himself, and which Lucas turned down.

Lucas claimed turning the award down was necessary to maintain his supposed "objectivity" which really means avoiding being seen as a hack propagandist, though a somewhat sophisticated one to the unsceptical.

As regards the new President in Poland there are few grounds for optimism. There were no left wing candidates even on prominent offer. The idea of election canvassing in Krakow was plaster posters over the posters of rivals.

The most idiotic candidate was Korwin Mikke who claims to be extreme libertarian in knocking off 90% of the existing tax bill and encouraging "rugged individualism". He seems to have thought the US of the 1840s is a model here.

Naturally, this is historically illiterate. Ignoring the genocide of the Native American, the expansion of the USA in the mid to late nineteenth century was underwritten by state power. It was never achieved only by "rugged individuals" ( cowboys ).

Poland is a potentially rich land with large numbers of fine and highly intelligent citizens. Yet the politicians act like imbeciles, even on a scale that makes British politicians look relatively sensible.