MB Civic

By CRAIG S. SMITH

GDANSK, Poland, July 14 — Lech Walesa, the hero of the Solidarity movement and former president now adrift in this political backwater, sat back in his office atop this city’s historic Green Gate to reminisce about another Lech who worked for him years ago.

“His approach is to first destroy and then think about what to build,” Mr. Walesa said of the country’s current president, Lech Kaczynski, who served as Mr. Walesa’s national security chief.

That sums up a growing consensus that has rippled across this still fledgling democracy in the days since Mr. Kaczynski appointed his twin brother, Jaroslaw, to the post of prime minister earlier this month. Many Poles see the twins’ leadership as consolidating a shift toward right-wing, nationalist politics that has polarized the country between older, less educated rural voters who elected Mr. Kaczynski and the younger, educated urban voters who largely oppose him.

Already, President Kaczynski had alienated Germany and strained relations with the European Union. He has nearly stopped the government’s privatization program and has concentrated on a parliamentary commission to reassess privatization and banking practices since the end of Communist rule here 17 years ago. His current focus is lustration, the process of exposing former Communist Party collaborators and rooting them from positions of power.

“They concentrate on the past,” said Marek Ostrowski, an editor at the Polish weekly magazine Polityka. “The future seems to be not so important for them.”

A poll this month by the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza found just 21 percent of people questioned saw Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s appointment as a positive move.

The Kaczynski twins were born to a World War II resistance fighter and a philologist 57 years ago and got an early taste of celebrity as child film actors. They look so much alike that to tell them apart people look for a mole that Lech Kaczynski has on his left cheek.

They say their hero is Jozef Pilsudski, the Polish field marshal who resurrected the Polish state in 1918, but later, disillusioned with partisan quarrels, seized power in a 1926 coup and ruled as dictator until his death in 1935. The Polish press has made much of the inevitable comparisons.

Many people see the appointment of President Kaczynski’s brother as prime minister as a step toward the so-called Fourth Republic that the twin brothers have said they want to build. The Fourth Republic would purge former Communists from the corridors of power and concentrate power in the hands of the president.

They lack the two-thirds parliamentary majority required for the constitutional changes that would make that dream a reality, but securing the presidency and the prime minister’s job comes close to the same thing.

Since Lech Kaczynski became president in December 2005, he has spent much of his energy on consolidating control of Poland’s major state-owned enterprises. Early this year, he sparked a public outcry with the appointment of Jaromir Netzel, a Gdansk lawyer with no experience running a large company, to head the country’s biggest insurer, PZU.

The ambitious electoral program that helped bring Mr. Kaczynski to power, meanwhile, has been mostly forgotten. He promised to build three million apartments in the next eight years, for example, but now says that is up to private enterprise.

Foreign relations stand to suffer the most from Mr. Kaczynski’s tenure, observers say. The president canceled two major foreign visits earlier this month, one to Britain and the other a summit meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Jacques Chirac of France, citing unexplained health problems. Many Poles believe that the cancellations were more likely a case of diplomatic flu.

The cancellation of the three-way summit meeting came after a German newspaper lampooned the twins as the “new Polish potatoes” and said that the only thing Lech Kaczynski knew about Germany was “the spittoon in the men’s toilet at Frankfurt Airport.” He has demanded an apology from the government.

Relations with the European Union, meanwhile, have been strained over Poland’s resistance to cross-border takeovers of its big companies.

Many people are wondering if the twins had a hand in the sudden downfall of Zyta Gilowska, deputy prime minister and finance minister, who resigned last month after a new public prosecutor started an investigation into her possible links with the Communists’ secret police. The investigation was stopped as soon as Ms. Gilowska resigned. It is unclear on what evidence the investigation was started, but many Poles see the case as an example of how lustration can be abused.

“I didn’t like their constant conspiracy theories, always suspecting people, always involved in intrigues,” said Mr. Walesa, his signature mustache now snowy white. He fired both brothers — Jaroslaw Kaczynski was a senior adviser — in 1993.

Despite the concerns about their policies, Mr. Walesa said that the brothers would not have time to do much damage because a free press and nongovernmental organizations would keep them in check until new elections in less than four years.

“Democracy is working,” Mr. Walesa said. “If they threaten that, they will be taught a lesson.”