6/5/2006- Deprived of a parliamentary majority, unable to agree with the liberals of the Civic Platform, Polish conservatives formed a government with populists and nationalists of the extreme right on Friday, May 5. President Lech Kaczynski named Andrzej Lepper, head of the Samoobrona (Self-Defense) peasant party, and Roman Giertych, head of the League of Polish Families, as Vice-Prime Ministers in the cabinet of Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz. The former, who had a quarrel with the law during the 1990s for barring the roads with tractors, will be ... Minister of Agriculture. The latter, an ultra-nationalist ideologue, homophobe, moderator of the Youth of Greater Poland movement, an Anti-Semite, a fundamentalist Catholic close to that Radio Marya that worries even the Vatican, will be Minister of Education. The two do not hide their hostility to Poland's integration into Europe, even if Mr. Lepper now vaunts the merits of Community subsidies. Their nomination led to the resignation of the Foreign Affairs minister, Stefan Meller, a diplomat and academic born in France, one of the Polish government's last survivors from Solidarity.
This cabinet reshuffle marks the end of the post-communist transition period. Former communists transformed into Social Democrats and the heirs to Solidarity alternated in power during the first decade of the return to democracy. Last autumn's elections cleaned them out. The forces that had disappeared during the forty years of Soviet control are resurfacing, as though the Polish political landscape were rediscovering its pre-war contours. Perhaps it's a forced and provisional landscape before the country becomes a real modern democracy where ultranationalist and obscurantist movements would have no chance of sharing in governmental responsibilities. That explanation is for reassurance. The ascension of the extreme right in one of the principal states of the "new" Europe nonetheless remains worrying. The Poles have become well-known, since the negotiations for Poland's adhesion, then its entry into the European Union, for bitterly defending their own interests. Nothing is more normal than that. But it's another thing altogether to abet the arrival in power of parties and persons who fundamentally share neither Europe's objectives nor its values. An analogous situation occurred in the early 2000s when Jörg Haider's populists entered the conservative government in Vienna. At the time, Austria was made the object of "sanctions." Today, the European Union says nothing. Tired out, it has even lost its capacity for indignation.
This editorial apeared originally in Le Monde. Translation for t r u t h o u t by French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher. © Truthout http://www.truthout.org/index.htm