Nine months after calling the idea unacceptable, Poland's ruling party yesterday on Saturday made the identical Kaczynski twins the most powerful men in the country, naming Jaroslaw as prime minister to serve alongside the president, Lech, his junior by 45 minutes.
"We decided to take the risk and have a prime minister and president who are brothers," said Jaroslaw, who will now be asked by his brother to form a new Cabinet.
The Law and Justice party nominated Jaroslaw after accepting the resignation of Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz who upset the twins recently by showing unexpected signs of political independence.
He was seen as the Kaczynskis' puppet when they appointed him last autumn, after Lech became president and Jaroslaw stepped into the shadows as party boss, saying that Poland and the world would not accept identical twins as the country's top leaders.
Marcinkiewicz was unhappy that they forged a coalition with the nationalist League of Polish Families and the populist Self Defense party, and when he defied them by appointing his own adviser as finance minister and holding unauthorized talks with the Civic Platform opposition party, the Kaczynskis are believed to have forced him out.
"Relations between Marcinkiewicz and Jaroslaw Kaczynski have been constantly deteriorating. What's more, the president was putting pressure on his brother to replace Marcinkiewicz," wrote Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita on Saturday.
The opposition bemoaned a Kaczynski double-act at the summit of Polish power.
"I am afraid that with Jaroslaw Kaczynski as a new prime minister, Poland will become more extreme, more anti-European and a more xenophobic country," said senior Civic Platform member Bronislaw Komorowski.
The 57-year-old Kaczynskis came to power promising a "moral revolution" that would root out corruption in Polish politics, redistribute wealth, help Poland's poor and 18 percent unemployed, and strengthen traditional values in a staunchly Catholic country.
But the twins irked critics at home and abroad by advocating the death penalty and criticizing homosexuals, reinforcing an illiberal attitude earned by Lech when he banned two gay parades in Warsaw as the city's mayor and called the organizers "perverts."
In a torrid week, the president provoked diplomatic mutterings by withdrawing at the last minute from a summit with his French and German counterparts, citing unspecified "digestive problems."
Polish media insisted, however, that he had in fact thrown a tantrum over a German newspaper article about the Kaczynskis, headlined "Poland's New Potatoes," which claimed that Lech boasted of having "never extended even a fingernail towards a German politician" and of knowing nothing about the country beyond "the spittoon in the men's toilet at Frankfurt airport."
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