Skip to main content

The Evil twin

I do not have very much time for the current Polish government.

The current Prime Minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski lives with his mother and a cat. Naturally he is fierce in his denunciation of homosexuality.

His identical twin, Lech, has managed to escape the apron strings- in order to become President of the Republic.

The twins are both backward looking backwoodsmen. Obsessive about who did what to whom during the Communist era, they have not had very much to say about the future. Even Lech Walesa regards them as strange. Their party- PiS- entered into a coalition with the Polish families League, LPR, whose bizarre Catholic jihad agenda has led them to be nick named the "Adams Family League". About from the LPR PiS entered into coalition with Samoobrona- "Self Defence"- whose quasi-fascist policies previously made them verboten as coalition partners. A Polish businessman said to me last week- "at least you know where you are with Lepper (Samoobrona's perma-tanned caudillo) - he is just a perfectly normal sleazy politician, the twins are warped and just plain weird.

The collapse of the coalition amid allegations of corruption should now lead to new elections. The Polish people deserve a better leadership than this ill assorted collection of spooks and misfits.

The opinion polls suggest that the Liberal opposition, Civic Platform, should win- I certainly hope so. The tragedy is that Lech Kaczynski will stay in office. Although most people think that it is his brother who is the evil twin, it unwise to assume his independence in these circumstances.

Comments

Anonymous said…
The Civic Union has a lot to be said for it as an economically liberal and socially tolerant party, but it has not adopted a Liberal identity. It sits with the centre-right European People's Party in the European parliament. Maybe they should be won over for to the ELDR/ALDE and the Liberal International but we need to know why the joined conservatives in the EU first.
10:44 pm
Cicero said…
Granted- One of the component parties, the Freedom Union was in ALDE. I think it is worth pursuing.
9:58 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop
Post a Comment
Read more

KamiKwasi brings an end to the illusion of Tory economic competence

After a long time, Politics seems to be getting interesting again, so I thought it might be time to restart my blog. With regard to this weeks mini budget, as with all budgets, there are two aspects: the economic and the political. The economic rationale for this package is questionable at best. The problems of the UK economy are structural. Productivity and investment are weak, infrastructure is under-invested and decaying. Small businesses are going to the wall and despite entrepreneurship being relatively strong in Britain, self-employment is increasingly unattractive. Red tape since Brexit has led to a significant fall in exports and the damage has been disproportionately on small businesses. Literally none of these problems are being addressed by this package. Even if the package were to stimulate some kind of short term consumption-led growth boom, this is unlikely to be sustainable, not least because what is being added on the fiscal side will be need to be offset, to a great de
Post a Comment
Read more

Media misdirection

In the small print of the UK budget we find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British Finance Minister) has allocated a further 15 billion Pounds to the funding for the UK track and trace system. This means that the cost of the UK´s track and trace system is now 37 billion Pounds.  That is approximately €43 billion or US$51 billion, which is to say that it is amount of money greater than the national GDP of over 110 countries, or if you prefer, it is roughly the same number as the combined GDP of the 34 smallest economies of the planet.  As at December 2020, 70% of the contracts for the track and trace system were awarded by the Conservative government without a competitive tender being made . The program is overseen by Dido Harding , who is not only a Conservative Life Peer, but the wife of a Conservative MP, John Penrose, and a contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford. Many of these untendered contracts have been given to companies that seem to have no notewo
Post a Comment
Read more