Inside Story: Peace or ceasefire?

Mourners gather in Warsaw after the air crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski and other senior officials in April, precipitating the current election campaign. Photo: Piotr Paw?owski/ Flickr

Is the thaw in relations between Poland and Russia sustainable? The Polish presidential election campaign and recent trends in Russian foreign policy highlight the key factors in play, writes John Besemeres.

This sunday’s second round of the Polish presidential election pits the current parliamentary speaker against a former prime minister in an unexpectedly tight race. Bronislaw Komorowski, the speaker and acting president, is a member of Premier Donald Tusk’s governing Civic Platform party. His opponent is Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the Law and Justice Party and the twin brother of the late president, Lech Kaczynski, who died in the air crash near Smolensk on 10 April.

That accident also took the lives of many of Poland‘s political and military elite, who were on their way to commemorate the massacre of Polish officers by the Soviet secret police at Katyn in 1940. The crash not only precipitated this election but also seems to have contributed to Kaczynski’s surprisingly strong showing in the first round. It has also reinforced a tentative thaw in relations between Poland and its largest neighbour, Russia, although the smooth course of the relationship is by no means certain.

Both Komorowski and Kaczynski represent parties on the right of the political spectrum, but there the similarity ends. Law and Justice is populist, deeply clerical, militantly nationalist and socially very conservative ? though it does have a proclivity for intervening in the economy to defend the government sector and bring about income redistribution. Civic Platform is more secular and centrist on social issues, but favours liberal economic policies; externally, its nationalism is muted and it seeks cooperative relationships wherever possible, including with former adversaries.

Where Law and Justice has been acerbically Eurosceptic, Civic Platform has embraced the European Union and is trying to build Warsaw‘s influence within that grouping by drawing closer to its key players. When Law and Justice used its period in government from 2005 to 2007 to begin to radically alter state institutions to create what they called a ’Fourth Republic,? purged of the communist influences they claimed were endemic in the post-communist Poland, Civic Platform saw these efforts as sectarian and dangerously anti-democratic. Although both parties emerged from the communist-era dissident and Solidarity traditions, in which their leaders played prominent roles, the enmity between them has become sharp.

Read the full article: http://inside.org.au/peace-or-ceasefire

John Besemeres is a Visiting Fellow in the Centre for European Studies at The Australian National University. Inside Story is edited at the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology in association with ANU. Selected articles from Inside Story appear in the Forum section of the Canberra Times.