The result of Poland's first chance to pass judgment on the ruling Kaczynski twins will be known tomorrow, writes Daniel McLaughlinin Warsaw
At the Church of St Stanislaw Kostka, in the Warsaw suburb where the Kaczynski twins grew up, you can glimpse the world through the eyes of the men who rule Poland. It sits just off a square named after Woodrow Wilson, the US president who helped restore Poland's independence after the first World War, and down the road from an 18th-century fort where Russian troops tortured and killed Polish resistance fighters. The churchyard contains a memorial to the 200,000 people who died in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, when the Allies abandoned Poland to fight the Nazis alone, as well as plaques honouring soldiers killed by the forces of Hitler and Stalin.
This was also the parish church of Fr Jerzy Popieluszko, whose searing sermons in support of the pro-democracy Solidarity movement won him the adoration of his people and the loathing of the communist agents who murdered him in 1984. His body lies here, surrounded by fresh flowers, a steady trickle of mourners and reminders of a bloody history of invasion, repression and betrayal that beats like a hot pulse beneath the skin of modern Poland, and through the veins of its most powerful men.
The Kaczynskis were raised in this Warsaw district, called Zoliborz, and it shaped the view of history and the world that they have brought to the summit of Polish politics: Lech as president and Jaroslaw, the elder twin by 45 minutes, as prime minister. Critics say the brothers are obsessed with settling old scores with Germany, Russia, Poland's former communists and their own political enemies.
But millions of Poles craved the "moral revolution" prescribed by the Kaczynskis to create a nation built on traditional Catholic values, cleansed of the taint of Nazi invasion, Kremlin-backed communism and a decade and a half of corrupt democracy. That was what the twins promised almost a year ago, when their Law and Justice party took government and Lech became president.
But given a first opportunity to pass judgment on their rule - local elections that will be completed tomorrow - Poles seem poised to dole out a pair of bloody noses.
In the first round of voting, Law and Justice (PiS) trailed the liberal Civic Platform (PO) opposition party, and tomorrow's run-off is expected to confirm defeat for the ruling party. Such an outcome would pain the Kaczynskis, a year after they scrapped coalition talks with PO and allied with the nationalist, Catholic fundamentalist League of Polish Families and the left-wing populist party Self Defence.
Their torrid political marriage has staggered from crisis to crisis, in a grim soap opera that has prevented Poland, the country with the highest unemployment in the EU, implementing any fundamental reforms. Instead, the Kaczynskis have sought to shore up their support among the rural and urban poor by picking fights abroad with Germany, Russia and Brussels, and at home with a shadowy elite of former communists whom they insist still secretly pull the strings of Polish politics, finance, media and the security services.
"Our EU partners see Poland as historical and hysterical," says PO senator Urszula Gacek. "The Kaczynskis are not tackling the main issues: 16 per cent unemployment, 22 per cent among the under-25s; the fact that at least 1 million Poles have left the country in the last two years, and there's no guarantee that they'll come back," she complains. "Law and Justice believe democracy has not served Poland well, and they are looking back for someone to blame rather than looking ahead at how to put things right."
THE TWINS BELIEVE things started to go wrong in 1989, with the Round Table agreement that managed Poland's transition from communism to market democracy. Drawn up in a spirit of reconciliation, the deal let the communists build a new state together with their foes from Solidarity; there would be no purge, and that angered the Kaczynskis.
"These guys consider the Round Table talks to be treason, because they allowed certain people with a communist past to retain their posts and do well," says Marek Antoni Nowicki, president of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Warsaw. "They think we need to go back to 1989, put a question mark on everything that has happened since, and start from scratch."
Part of that belated reckoning is a new law, championed by the Kaczynskis, which could see hundreds of thousands of Poles sacked from their jobs unless they provide proof that they did not collaborate with the communist secret police.
Social policy under the deeply Catholic twins, critics say, is equally reactionary: Lech approves of the death penalty and banned Warsaw's gay parade when he was the city's mayor, while Jaroslaw has said homosexuals should not teach in schools. A coalition member, the League of Polish Families, meanwhile, has opposed anti-homophobia lessons in schools and is accused of maintaining close links with violent anti-Semitic groups.
But it is in foreign affairs that the Kaczynskis have most alarmed the EU, by fighting ugly diplomatic scraps with Poland's old enemies, Russia and Germany. They have argued about a pipeline linking the two countries but bypassing Poland, and an "unwell" Lech withdrew from talks with the German chancellor after a Berlin newspaper called him a "potato"; Jaroslaw, meanwhile, went to a former Nazi concentration camp and derided a Berlin exhibition on post-war Germans who were expelled from eastern Europe.
"The people who took power last year had one populist slogan, to break the power of the old elite," said Prof Bronislaw Geremek, Poland's foreign minister from 1997 to 2000. "They haven't been able to create a single positive programme in foreign affairs, but harp on with an anti-German and anti- Russian stance."
THE KACZYNSKIS' WORLDVIEW was formed by the Warsaw Uprising, in which their father fought and their mother was a nurse, and lightly armed Polish fighters attacked the Nazis while the Red Army watched carnage ensue from across the river. Western attempts to help were blocked by Stalin, who was happy to see the German army decimate partisans who would have opposed his own imminent takeover of Poland.
Invaded by Germany, then left to the tender mercies of the Kremlin by its supposed allies, Poland's national memory seethes with mistrust and grievance over historical wrongs that have never been fully acknowledged, never mind put right. This spirit moves the Kaczynskis' relations with Berlin, Moscow, and a Brussels that many Poles fear will erode their hard-won sovereignty; no surprise then, that yesterday's EU-Russia summit was clouded by Warsaw's latest row with the Kremlin.
Isolated in Europe and under pressure at home, at least the Kaczynski twins have each other to share the burden of responsibility for their first, "lost" year in power.