What do you get
when two identical twins who gained fame as impish child
actors become president and prime minister of their country?
In Poland, political vaudeville.
Ever since Lech
and Jaroslaw Kaczynski won election in 2005, Poland's
political scene has become so loony that some humorists are
hailing it a golden age of political entertainment.
''Life just
surpasses my capabilities as a satirist--very many of
the things that have happened in Poland in recent
years could not have been thought up by the best
satirists,'' said cartoonist Szczepan Sadurski.
Prime Minister
Jaroslaw Kaczynski last year brought two unpredictable
populist parties into the coalition in an effort to shore up
his government--an uncomfortable alliance that
was an endless source of political farce until it
collapsed this week.
Parliament at one
point held a special Mass to pray for rain during a
drought. A ruling party official called for investigating
the children's TV show Teletubbies because the
character Tinky Winky appeared to be gay. And two
eccentric cabinet ministers showed up at a news
conference with stuffed toy foxes.
Jaroslaw
Kaczynski drew ridicule in May for revealing that he has no
bank account and instead deposits his money in his
mother's account. The prime minister, whose Law and
Justice Party won the 2005 election on pledges to
fight corruption, said he was afraid someone might deposit
money into his account without his knowledge and frame
him for corruption.
Predictably, the
Kaczynksis, 58, are the butt of jokes just for being
twins. One popular Internet game shows pictures of a
Kaczynski brother and asks people to guess if it's
Lech or Jaroslaw.
Poles also poke
fun at their diminutive stature. Why do the Kaczynski
twins ride in cars with tinted windows? So you can't see the
children's booster seats they sit on. Why did the
president and prime minister meet last week at a
tennis court? To play volleyball.
On Monday the
round-faced, gray-haired brothers stood side by side at
Warsaw's Belvedere palace to announce that they were
dismissing all four cabinet ministers belonging to the
right-wing League of Polish Families and the agrarian
Self-Defense Party.
A month earlier,
the leaders of the two parties, Roman Giertych and
Andrzej Lepper, announced they were forming a new group
called ''LiS,'' or ''Fox'' in Polish. Both appeared at
the news conference with red and white plush foxes.
Political
humorists lampooned the stunt. On its front page the weekly
Wprost showed a smiling Jaroslaw Kaczynski
dressed as a hunter with a dead fox in each hand.
Some say the
Kaczynskis and their allies have nourished a culture of
political humor more vibrant than any era since the
dysfunctional days of communism, when satire
flourished as an outlet for public frustration.
TV skits,
political cabaret, blogs, and cartoons abound, while
political jokes are e-mailed at a dizzying pace.
One cartoon even
poked fun at the explosion of the political humor. The
caricature in the Polityka weekly showed a
distressed artist from the fictitious "Union of Cartoonists"
shouting into a telephone, ''We must bring in satirists from
China and Ukraine!!! Our people can't keep up!''
In May, Ewa
Sowinska, the ombudsman for children's rights and member of
the League of Polish Families, announced she would ask
psychologists to look into whether the
Teletubbies might have ''hidden homosexual
undertones'' because the character Tinky Winky appears
to be male yet carries a red handbag.
A similar
controversy erupted in the United States in 1999 when a
publication belonging to evangelical leader the late
reverend Jerry Falwell suggested that Tinky Winky was
gay.
Gay rights
activists condemned Sowinska's remark, and she quickly
dropped the plan.
But humorists
pounced. A joke circulated on the Internet juxtaposing
Tinky Winky--a little purple figure crowned by a TV
antenna--with a Polish version: a purple figure
in a priest's collar, with a cross on its head and a
censor in hand.
Private news
channel TVN24 recently ran sound bites of politicians
commenting on the crumbling governing coalition and the
likelihood of early elections.
The station added
no verbal commentary--only circus music. (Vanessa
Gera, AP)
