How sexy is President Lech Kaczynski?

President Lech Kaczynski is the 116 hottest leader of state in the world, according to a Canadian satirical web site.

The Hottest Heads of State web site has ranked 172 leaders of state, or government, in terms of their sex appeal.

No criteria is given, or methodology. But Lech Kaczynski is ranked just nine places below Chancellor Angela Merkel - natch! - but three places above Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, and 56 places above the decidedly un-sexy Chairman of the National Defence of North Korea, Kim Jong-il.

The world’s most sexiest politician, according to Hottest Heads of State, is Ukraine’s prime minister and presidential candidate, Yulia Tymoshenko. Ghhrrrrrrow!

The compiler of the list does have an idiosyncratic view of what ”hotness” entails, however. Ranked at number 12 in the ranking of the world’s hottest statesman is Belarus president. Aleksander Lukashenko.

Rydzyk’s hotline to heaven

I have seen the future, and the future is...Father Tadeusz Rydzyk!

The restless, ultra conservative, media empire of the founder of Radio Maryja, TV Trwam, the newspaper Nasz Dziennik, a ‘media school’ in Torun and much more besides, is now moving where no restless, ultra conservative, media mogul has moved before: the mobile phone market!

It’s a logical business move. Take the loyal audience you have - and there is no more loyal a media audience - and push a product directly at them. It's a happy coincidence, too, that much of your target audience is one of the rare demographics in Poland that doesn’t much use mobile phones - the old and/or the deeply confused about modern life.

The product on offer is a pre-paid mobile phone with very big buttons, just perfect for those arthritic fingers to make a quick call to family, friends, the priest and even one of those infamous radio phone-in shows that are always on Radio Maryja, and make a quick anti-Semitic remark, or two?

For more information call 720 00 77 77. Numbers beginning with a “7”, in Poland, by the way, mean you pay.

Zloty from heaven!

Madonna versus the Black Madonna in Poland

So outraged are some of the more religiously minded in Poland, that they are organizing a mass pray-in to keep her out of Warsaw on August 15.

She is the Material Girl who charges outrageous sums of money for concerts - the tickets here have been retailing at eye-watering prices - around 250 euro for a seated ticket. She’s a Kabbalist, exhibitionist, African baby-poacher. She is the conical - titted, self promotional genius/trickster; Nelson Mandela has been out of prison longer than the last decent song she wrote was in the charts; she can’t sing and I don’t really like her muscles.

There’s lots of things you can say about Madonna. But I never thought she was Satan in ripped fishnets.

But…thenews.pl reports:

Several forms of protest are being planned against the Madonna concert in Poland on 15 August, including mass prayer sessions.
Religious groups are outraged that the concert is being held on a Catholic feast day celebrating the Assumption of Holy Mary.

And the protestors have received the surprise support from former Solidarity leader and ex-president Lech Walesa. “It is true. I support this protest,” he told the Dziennik daily.

Head of the regional Mazowieckie council, Marian Brudzynski, is coordinating two weeks of the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy prayer on the rosary and an outdoor mass at Warsaw City Hall, all in the name of blocking the pop star’s concert in the capital.

Blimey! August 15 is also a national holiday - Army Day. Sounds rather secular. But this is the day, in 1920, when the Miracle of the Vistula occurred - when General Pilsudski’s men - with, so many think, a little help from the Man Upstairs - beat back Trotsky’s Red Army and saved the whole of Europe from the communist menace.

President Kaczynski - not, I imagine, from Madonna’s natural fan-base - has said that there is nothing constitutionally to stop the woman from giving a concert.

But Madonna - the singer - is popular here. she sold out those very expensive tickets. Easily. The battle of the Madonnas - the black one versus the white - is a delicious example of Poland’s version of the Culture Wars.

Sorry I have been away...

And thanks to readers who sent emails for me to keep going, but I have been a little distracted, recently.

I won’t bore you with the details - other than to say that money - or the lack of it - is the root of all evil: especially when your employer seems to not have very much of it. Suddenly.

Anyway, where were we? Oh, yeah...

Poland, Japan and Nazis were going to invade Soviet Union?

Seventy years ago, as the dark clouds of war gathered over Europe, Poland was in secret alliance with Nazi Germany, and Japan, preparing to invade the Soviet Union. (caption on poster, above, says: Under the great leadership of Stalin, forward to communism!)

I know that your history book in school never told you that, but that’s what Russians are being told. I know your history book told you that the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was the not so secret agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in preparation for invading Poland. But you got it all wrong.

The Soviet Union, says a documentary that was broadcast on Russian state TV this week, had to sign the non aggression pact with the Nazis, otherwise the Poles were going to march all the way to Moscow - meet up with their Japanese chums for a tray of sushi and a jolly glass of vodka - and then depose Stalin and set up a fascist regime in Uncle Joe’s place.

Preposterous? Well, maybe highly possible to a Russian audience that is seeing history being re-written by the Kremlin. We have got used to seeing reports of school text books explaining away the Great Famine and the purges of the 1930s in the Soviet Union as necessary evils. Now get used to seeing Poland as the aggressor which almost single handed started WW II.

Poland’s foreign ministry is not pleased with the documentary. At all. In fact, it’s a little bit miffed. In a statement from its embassy in Moscow today, it said:

“It is sad that such a report was broadcast at prime time. Certainly, it will not improve the relationship between our two countries and will not lead to reconciliation between our nations.”

Meanwhile, as Poland starts to think about the 70th anniversary of the invasions in September 1939 of the Soviets and Nazis, Russia is remembering the 68th anniversary of the outbreak of the war.

No, this is not some Polish-Russian dispute over mathematics. For Russians - as this news report by RT, the Russian English language TV, shows - the Great Patriotic War started, not in 1939, but 1941, when Hitler went back on his non aggression agreement with Stalin.

If two sides can’t even agree on when a war broke out, what chances of burying, once and for all, the hatchet of terrible history between them?

Make June 4 Freedom Day!

The media have gone wall-to-wall here in Poland celebrating, remembering, analysing the first round of the elections in 1989 that eventually brought about the first government led by non-communists for decades. A good chance to declare a national holiday! (phot0 - 20th Anniversary of Polish People's Republic Street crossed out)

But no. While prime ministers and presidents from ex-communist countries plus Angela Merkel were in Krakow and Gdansk trying to give profound speeches and meaningful handshakes to each other, the rest of us was stuck at work. It was a normal day for the masses, as our leaders got a chance to look good on CNN et al.

So, no Freedom Day for us. But last Sunday - I learned last Sunday - was a national holiday: meaning all the supermarkets were shut! That came as a shock. It was Zielone Swiatki - Pentecost, which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and other followers of Jesus as described in the Book of Acts... apparently.

Problem with national days that fall on a Sunday, is that I wasn’t at work, anyway. So it wasn’t a holiday for most people, except people who work in big shops. Zielone Swiatki should be called Tesco is the Anti-Christ Day.

But wouldn’t June 4 make more sense as a national holiday? That was a day that symbolises something both local - to Poles - and universal, to all of us.

The media has gone nuts about it. The TVN 24 hour round the clock news channel has been going round the clock with the story. They even had one of those ‘virtual studios’ that I first saw CNN do on election day in the US. The entire studio was decked out like the Dziennik news programme on the old TVP state channel, circa 1989. Correspondents - and this was a daft trick borrowed from CNN - that were in Gdansk or Krakow would be beamed down into the studio in Warsaw. Which was meant to impressive - except for the fact that the whole point of having a correspondent in Gdansk is that you can see him or her on the spot in Gdansk.

But the media have gone for this in such a big way because it genuinely is a day that moves people. To think of how it was then and how far Poland, and themselves, have come since.

Of course, the deal that Solidarity struck with the communists back then at the Round Table talks - effectively allowing them to become part of the governing process, even though virtually all of the seats contested in that election would be won by opposition candidates - has come to plague politics in Poland even since. It was a compromise to maintain stability, while radical economic shocks were put in place. But the compromise had a cost - and the Law and Justice party under the Kaczynskis are basically a creation of it. With no communist conspiracies and cliques to rage against, Jaroslaw Kaczynski would have to invent some.

But even so...This day seems a good time for a national holiday, to me. Make June 4 Freedom Day in Poland!

LPR alliance makes UK Libertas candidate quit

A candidate for Libertas in the UK has resigned from the party because of Declan Ganley’s alliances with ultra nationalists like the League of Polish Families (LPR). (hat tip: Bueys Own)

Candidate for the North West England European election constituency, and UK policy director, Ben Tallis (pictured above), has had enough of Libertas’s contentment to ally themselves with some strange far right parties in countries like Poland and the Czech Republic. Informing of his decision this week to stand down from Libertas‘s election list, Tallis said:

"As the campaign has progressed I have come to realise that while I am committed to Libertas’ goals of reforming the EU from a pro-European perspective and admire the Libertas team in the UK, I cannot agree with certain aspects of the wider European party, notably in the Czech Republic and Poland.

Specifically, the problem seems to have been Libertas’s acceptance of candidates from the League of Polish Families, All Polish Youth and supported by presidents of public television channels on their list in Poland.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the Irish Times today that Lech Walesa had told him that when he is at the Libertas Dublin rally this weekend he will tell the anti-Lisbon Treaty party to...well, support ratification of the Lisbon Treaty! This came as a “great relief” to the pro Lisbon Polish prime minister, apparently. Which is...nice.

But as Libertas lose more and more credibility as polling day approaches for the European parliamentary elections, Lech Walesa’s little Libertas odyssey (see previous post) will have done his credibility no good at all. Which is a shame. As the UK goes to the polls on June 4, Walesa will be trying to be taken seriously and bathing in the lime light of the celebrations in Poland of 20 years since the fall of communism - back in the days when people did take Walesa seriously.

Latest opinion polls put Libertas support in Poland at a measly two percent.

Poland’s strange fascination with Libertas

As the European parliamentary elections loom - scheduled for Sunday, June 7 in Poland - the amount of space in the press and time taken up on air by stories about the anti-Lisbon Treaty Libertas party far outweighs the amount of votes they will get on polling day.

On February 1 this year, a few hundred delegates turned up in Warsaw for a meeting with Libertas founder, the Irish millionaire Declan Ganley, the man who helped successfully organise the “No” vote in Ireland’s referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. See video of Ganley in Poland in January here).

Although Ganley said, when everyone was wondering who would support them in Poland, that extremists would not be welcome in the Polish section of Libertas, a weird and extreme bunch turned up for the meeting. Mirosław Orzechowski from the catholic-nationalist League of Polish Families (LPR) was there, so was Konrad Bonisławski from the League’s old youth wing, All-Polish Youth, an organisation frequently accused of anti-Semitism and ultra-nationalism.

There were also disaffected politicians from Andrzej Lepper’s Self Defence and a few drop outs from the Law and Justice party, as well. If Ganley didn’t want the marginal and the extreme - and his central message about the 'democratic deficit' in the EU is correct - 'then he certainly has got them. Who else is there in Poland? The EU is the only game in town around these parts.

Fast forward three months to the pan-European launch of the Libertas election campaign in Rome on May 1 and who is one of the star speakers? None other than Lech Walesa, who had apparently, just days before, given his support to the European People’s Party, the largest voting bloc currently in the European parliament and made up of christian-democratic parties, with members including Angela Merkel, Silvio Berlusconi and Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

Walesa told the Libertas delegates: “Declan Ganley and Libertas have the potential to change Europe for the better. This European Project has all the ingredients to become a historic force for good in the world, and grow into so much more than it is today. But for the to happen, we need to heed the Libertas message and put the people back at the heart of the project.”

Walesa told incredulous Polish journalists after the congress that he did not support Libertas but was asked to speak at the manifesto launch. So he did. He also made no secret of pocketing appearance money, thought to be as much as 100,000 euros. Since then he has made other appearances at Libertas events.

Walesa’s motives for dallying with Libertas - a party which now has the official backing of LPR’s Roman Giertych - are not merely financial. Walesa is addicted to being at the centre of controversies and desperately seeks the limelight when he can get it.

But he has embarrassed Donald Tusk - and much of the Polish political establishment - by being associated with Ganley’s ragbag of extremists, populists and chancers.

Walesa’s antics have also ensured that barely a day goes by without Libertas making the headlines in Poland. Their campaign manager, Daniel Pawlowiec (onetime journalist for Radio Maryja’s Nasz Dziennik newspaper and junior minister for the League of Polish Families in the Law and Justice government) has got hours of free publicity from the Polish media’s obsession with Libertas, way and above the support the party has in the country.

The media exposure for Libertas in Poland - Gazeta Wyborcza has calculated that it has received the third most amount of airtime on public television, despite being nowhere in the opinion polls - is helped by the apparent support of the state broadcaster TVP.

It’s speculated that this support comes from weirdo TVP president, Piotr Farfał, who has connections going back years to Libertas affiliate for the European elections, the League of Polish Families.

But the contradictions within Libertas policies - which seem to change depending on which country it is campaigning in - are beginning to suggest that this strange coalition may not stay together very much longer than the election campaign.

The central message of calling for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty may be easy for many to support. But Ganley’s support for internal markets within the EU - including campaigning for opening up labour markets for Poles in Austria and Germany - are in contradiction to recent comments from the Irish branch, and home, of Libertas. Party spokesperson Caroline Simmons has called for a Blue Card (visa) system to stem the tide of immigration coming to Ireland, which would, “reduce the burden to Ireland of caring for inhabitants of other member states,” she said. Libertas Ireland East candidate Raymond O Malley says we have “got to stop the tide coming in.”

The Blue Card system would limit the right of Poles and others to work in Ireland to two years and would deprive them of drawing welfare benefits, even though they would still be expected to pay taxes.

That a state broadcaster is promoting the interests of any political party - let alone one as marginal as Libertas - is, of course, a scandal. But the Polish media in general, and parts of the political establishment, seem to have a gory fascination with Ganley’s ragbag army.

And on June 7, Polish voters are going to make them all blush by ignoring all the fuss and voting for someone else - there has been no interest shown in opinion polls at all for Libertas - or more likely, voting for none at all. Recent opinion polls predict the turnout on June 7 to be under 15 percent. It was only 20 percent in the last election in 2004, just one month after Poland joined the European Union! The media might be fascinated by all this, but what the public feels about it seems to be a side issue.