POLAND ELECTS A HOMOPHOBIC, HARD-RIGHT PRESIDENT

The results of Poland's presidential election yesterday are in, and the winner of a run-off between two rightists is Lech Kaczynski, leader of the reactionary Law and Justice Party, with a healthy 10-point victory over his rival.

In choosing Kaczynski (above left), the Poles have also elected a world-class homophobe. As East European expert David Ost wrote in his pre-election analysis for DIRELAND: Kacyzynski has pledged to purge the Polish polity of crooks, put more people in prison, write a new Constitution, and stigmatize gays. Indeed, one of Kaczynski’s best-known acts in recent years, as Mayor of Warsaw, has been his decision, two years in a row, to ban the Gay Pride Parade. Before that, as Minister of Justice in 2000, he presided over a big increase in the prison population. Policies such as these have won him the enthusiastic support of the extremist right-wing Catholic Radio Maria radio station and its influential, openly anti-Semitic leader, Father Tadeusz Rydzyk (left). With his lavish economic promises combined with his support for an active and repressive state, Kaczynski appears as a populist out of the past; many in the Polish press compare him to Argentina’s Peron.

That Kaczynski is already preparing to abandon the populist demagogy of his campaign's economic promises is made clear by his parliamentary coalition's decision to name  Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz as prime minister. Marcinkiewicz (right) sits squarely in the neoliberal-but-religious-fundamentalist camp, so fashionable lately in this era of "there is no alternative" globalization. (Religion, in this view, is supposed to assuage citizens while social welfare is cut.) A radical Catholic activist in the early 1990s, Marcinkiewicz is militant in his condemnation of homosexuality as "unnatural" behavior that the state must stop from "infecting" others .....You can read the rest of David Ost's informative analysis of Polish politics by clicking here.