ANALYSIS:Poles will be anxious for answers – not just about what caused the crash in Smolensk, but how the country can fill the void in government, writes DEREK SCALLY
TWO MINUTES of silence at noon yesterday marked the start of a black week of mourning for Poland.
The death of Polish president Lech Kaczynski, his wife, Maria, and an array of important figures has left a gaping hole in Polish public life.
When the mourning period ends, Poles will be anxious for answers – not just about what caused the weekend aircraft crash in Smolensk, but how the country can fill the void in government and move on.
The most pressing question posed by Kaczynski’s death is where it leaves the national conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party he founded with his surviving twin brother, Jaroslaw.
Political analysts are agreed that, three days after the tragedy, anything could happen in Poland’s largest opposition party. Throw in the unpredictable former Polish prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and an unpredictable outcome is almost guaranteed.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski was and remains the central strategist in PiS and, though Saturday’s crash killed many key PiS figures, analysts agree it has not fatally wounded the party. “The party is far from decimated but, from a personnel perspective, it is in a critical condition,” says Eugeniusz Smolar of the Centre for International Relations.
Analyst Krzysztof Bobinski of the Unia Polska think tank agrees with that assessment. “It all depends now on how Jaroslaw holds up,” he says. “Considering the special relationship between twins, he may just fall apart, particularly as his mother is seriously ill too. Or he may be reinvigorated and take on his brother’s mantle to contest the presidential election.”
If Jaroslaw Kaczynski decides not to contest the election, due by June 30th, he could field an able protege such as Zbigniew Ziobro. Just 39, Ziobro served as Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s feared justice minister and proved to the party’s many enemies that its “Law and Justice” name was not just a label.
The Smolensk disaster might even give PiS an edge in the upcoming election. After five years in the presidential palace, Lech Kaczynski stayed the distance on the political stage longer than Jaroslaw, whose fractious coalition lasted just two years.
But polls showed Lech Kaczynski’s star was on the wane too. His passing means the party is no longer forced to back his candidacy just to save face. “PiS and its supporters now have their dead hero and any PiS candidate can run on that,” says Bobinski.
Ahead of the crash, polls suggested the man likely to be president in the autumn was Bronislaw Komorowski, the speaker of parliament.
Now acting head of state, Komorowski has no idea what PiS candidate he will face in two months.
One thing is certain: a PiS victory on a Smolensk sympathy vote would be a serious setback for Warsaw’s relations with Europe, carefully rebuilt by Donald Tusk’s centre-right Civic Platform (PO) since 2007.
At home, a PiS presidential election win would guarantee more friction with Tusk’s government of the kind that has paralysed Polish lawmaking and reform for three years.
The bitter irony of Kaczynski’s death, on his way to honour the 22,000 Polish soldiers killed in the Russian forest of Katyn in 1940, has not been lost on Poles. But perhaps an even greater irony is if, as some analysts have suggested, Kaczynski’s death gives a boost to relations between Poland and Russia, for decades two of Europe’s frostiest neighbours.
Things were already improving of late. Poles were surprised and touched by recent Russian gestures in the lead-up to this week’s 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre.
Some 20 years ago, Moscow first admitted responsibility for the 1940 atrocity. Ahead of this year’s anniversary, the Russian authorities offered considerable assistance to Polish survivors and victims’ families to travel to the Katyn site.
Last week, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin honoured those who “bravely met their death” there.
Even if he stopped short of a full apology, it was a long way from the nationalist rhetoric on the Stalin era that Poles have had to put up with from Moscow in recent years.
Since the crash, the Kremlin has gone out of its way to do the right thing: images of Putin and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev praying in a chapel went down well, as did the extensive facilities erected on site for families travelling from Poland to identify their loved ones.
“The Poles really appreciate such gestures at a time like this,” says Henryk Suchar, an international affairs analyst specialising in Polish-Russian relations.
Kaczynski was perhaps the sternest critic of Moscow in the central European region, one who never missed an opportunity to support countries he viewed as victims of Russian aggression.
He supported the Orange revolution in Ukraine and flew to Georgia in the middle of its war with Moscow in August 2008, even coming under fire from Russian troops when he travelled to the border with Georgia’s breakaway regions.
With his passing, Suchar says Russia has lost a man they loved to hate.
“Kaczynski was very anti-Russian in a clumsy way and gave Poland a very negative image in Russia,” he says. “The irony of his death is that it could well result in improved relations. That would be the president’s unforgettable contribution to Polish-Russian relations.”
The Smolensk crash, just 20km from the Katyn site, has reawakened two Polish wartime traumas: the 1940 forest massacre that wiped out many leading army majors and generals; and the mysterious plane crash in 1943 of Wladyslaw Sikorski, Poland’s exiled prime minister.
Former Solidarity leader and Polish president Lech Walesa suggested yesterday that this latest tragedy was comparable in scale to the 1940 massacre.
“Then, they shot our intelligentsia in the back of the heads. Now we’ve lost a huge part of our nation’s elite in a plane accident,” he said, adding: “It’s Katyn number two.”
His remark has been pounced on with triumph by Kaczynski supporters, but has prompted much head-shaking in other quarters. Moscow has yet to comment.
Yesterday evening, Kaczynski returned to the presidential palace in a coffin, ending the first act in this Polish tragedy. It is too soon to say for sure whether it will heal the bitter divisions that characterise Poland’s emotional style of politics.
“The politically correct thing to say would be that it would make Polish politics more calm and circumspect,” says Bobinski, “but the likelihood is that it will just redouble Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s paranoia towards his political opponents.”
Looking ahead, some urgent decisions have to be made in Warsaw even before the looming state funerals.
The death of central bank governor Slawomir Skrzypek meant there was a most urgent position to fill to stabilise the zloty after weekend trading. Skrzypek’s experienced deputy, Piotr Wiesiolek, has already stepped in; appointing a permanent replacement is a priority for the acting president.
Other personalities will be impossible to replace, such as “Solidarity Godmother” Anna Walentynowicz. It was her firing that prompted the 1980 Gdansk shipyard strike and spread the Solidarity trade union activism that eventually toppled communism in Poland.
Warsaw political watchers are confident that, though Poland will struggle, it will eventually fill the gaps left by the Smolensk crash.
“We lost some really brilliant people who were important in building up Polish civic society in the last 20 years,” says Smolar of the Centre for International Relations. “I don’t think it will have a huge effect on the country. Poland will recover and go on.”
Derek Scally is Berlin Correspondent