The pair polarizing the Poles

It is no secret that the identical twins who rule Poland these days don’t shy from a fight.

What no one could have predicted when longtime Polish nationalist Lech Kaczynski was elected president in 2005, and his brother, Jaroslaw, became prime minister nine months later, was just how many fights they were willing to pick.

A little more than a year after the diminutive, elfin-faced duo joined forces at the helm of one of Eastern Europe’s largest nations, they have taken on corruption, homosexuality, abortion, German hegemony and perceived Russian plots wherever they may be found.

Today, Poland is more isolated than ever in the European Union, and at home is in a state of political meltdown. The Kaczynskis gave the boot to their coalition partners in August amid irreconcilable disputes and scandal, and Parliament voted to call new elections Sunday.

Many Poles are growing weary of the Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride that has become the government in Warsaw, yet by many accounts the twins are as popular as ever among a large segment of the population.

“There is no middle feeling about them. They are either hated or loved,” said Warsaw journalist Michal Karnowski, who co-wrote a biography of the political pair. “They’ve been accused of all kinds of terrible things, but Polish public opinion makes a division based on only one thing: Do you steal, or do you not steal?”

Now, in one of the most portentous election campaigns in post-communist Poland, the Kaczynskis are fighting to maintain their vision of a nation destined to lead the “new Europe” and erase the poisonous relics of the past.

The 58-year-old twin leaders -- distinguishable only by a small mole to the left of the president’s nose -- have provided abundant fodder for Polish satirists and consternation among liberals for their conservative stands.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of the ruling Law and Justice Party and widely regarded as the shrewd strategist and heavyweight political power behind the duo, lives at home with his mother and famously refused to open a bank account for fear that he could be framed by a saboteur surreptitiously depositing funds in it.

Lech Kaczynski generated international headlines in February during a state visit to Ireland when he declared that the human race “would disappear if homosexuality was freely promoted.”

The Kaczynskis have openly courted relations with the Bush administration, supporting the deployment of Polish troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and inviting the U.S. to position a controversial missile defense system in Poland.

And they have aggressively taken on Germany and Russia, declaring that a planned gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea between the two nations, bypassing Poland, jeopardizes the country’s energy security.

But they have gone even further with Germany, which has been a key ally in the post-Communist era and the chief advocate of Poland’s entry to the EU.

“Defining Poland as a member of Western civilization, and at the same time being anti-German, it means isolation,” said Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski, a professor of sociology at Collegium Civitas university. “And this is precisely what we experienced in 1939.”

The reference to the era of the Hitler-Stalin pact that preceded the carve-up of Poland is often echoed by the Kaczynskis. The prime minister has argued that smaller countries should have a weighted vote in the EU to counteract the possibility of French-German domination of the organization, at one point saying his formula would allow Poland’s population to be represented at the size it would have been had the Holocaust never occurred. He left unspoken who was responsible for the decline in population.

Poland was able to win no more than a delay in the new voting rules, prompting a conservative Warsaw magazine to publish (with the help of a model) a gloriously bare-chested German Chancellor Angela Merkel with a Kaczynski twin suckling at each breast. Merkel was, the magazine declared, the “stepmother of Europe,” with presumably all the term’s fairy-tale implications.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski went a step further the next day, declaring that “something very negative” was happening in Germany. “Like an era which has already passed, the large majority of Europeans didn’t have the courage to talk about it. It is the same today,” he said.

In Germany, where the press was already referring to the Polish leaders as the “poison dwarfs,” there were predictable signs of outrage. “The Polish people deserve our solidarity. They are obviously ruled by two lunatics,” wrote a columnist for Der Tagesspiegel.

The Kaczynskis have since sought to mend fences with Merkel. But they also have made it clear that Poland intends to remain an active player, and a voice in the wilderness if need be, in European politics.

“In general, what we want is to have our potential in Europe based on our country’s potential. Nothing more. But at least that,” said Pawel Zalewski, head of Parliament’s foreign affairs committee for the Kaczynskis’ party.

The twins, whose roots are in the anti-communist Solidarity movement, have always appealed to the large proportion of the population who are devoutly Roman Catholic and proudly Polish.

They speak to the large numbers of often-older Poles who feel disenfranchised by those who capitalized on their connections to the former nomenklatura to become wealthy in the new free-market era.

“What the Kaczynskis did, and did very successfully in a politically gifted way, was they were able to integrate an otherwise dispersed social protest against a variety of things, and to successfully give a common denominator to this feeling of protest,” Wnuk-Lipinski said. “The Kaczynskis promised they will take care of those who were excluded or marginalized in the process of transition to democracy.”

Abortion is another fraught issue over which the Kaczynski government has done battle.

Poland’s abortion law is among the strictest in Europe, but the small, vehemently Catholic party that until the collapse of the government was in coalition with the Kaczynskis pushed for a constitutional amendment declaring that life begins at conception and a far more stringent law, banning abortion even for victims of rape.

The bid failed -- Lech Kaczynski came out against it, and his wife, as well, though she later was described as “a witch” by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, a prominent conservative priest who has been one of the Kaczynskis’ chief public allies on issues such as abortion, homosexual rights and relations with the rest of Europe.

Many analysts believe the political turmoil surrounding the collapse of the government may have been a shrewd calculation on the part of the Kaczynskis aimed at driving out the more marginal elements of their government and enlarging their own power base along more moderate lines.

If so, it was a bold gamble: The latest poll showed that the opposition Civic Platform party was running ahead of the Kaczynskis’ Law and Justice, 39% to 29%. Some analysts have said there could even be a coalition between the two parties, if the twins manage to moderate their policies.

Former President Lech Walesa, a onetime ally of the Kaczynskis’ in Solidarity who has called for their removal from the helm of state, said the political turmoil is a natural stage in the rough birth of a democratic state.

“You have to go through these bad experiences to improve,” he said in an interview. “My wife has eight children with me. Each one of them I took to the gas stove, and told them not to touch it. Do you know that not one of them didn’t get burned? No matter what you tell them, each one of them has to go through it themselves.

“This is the experience you have to go through with democracy.”

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kim.murphy@latimes.com