What do you get when two pudgy identical twins who gained fame as impish child actors become president and prime minister of Poland? A foolproof recipe for political vaudeville.
Ever since Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski won elections in 2005, Poland's political scene has become so loony that some observers are hailing a golden age of political entertainment.
There are serious consequences to all of the wackiness; the ruling coalition collapsed this week as a result of increasingly bizarre internal rows, opening the way for general elections as early as October.
Poles don't know whether to laugh or cry at the antics of their political class.
In the past 18 months, parliament held a special Mass to pray for rain during a drought; Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski acknowledged he has no bank account because he deposits his money with his mother; and a ruling party official called for investigating TV children's show Teletubbies because the character Tinky Winky seems to be gay.
So, few people batted an eyelid when two Cabinet ministers recently appeared at a news conference carrying stuffed animal toys as props for a major political announcement.
"Since the last elections and the rise to power of the current coalition, political humor has been unexpectedly resurrected," the Polish edition of Newsweek wrote recently.
The trend is captured by a cartoon in an issue of the Polityka weekly magazine this month, which shows 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!"
"Life just surpasses my capabilities as a satirist," cartoonist Szczepan Sadurski said.
In May, Jaroslaw Kaczynski revealed that he has no bank account because he's afraid that someone might deposit money into his account without his knowledge.
The prime minister's effort last year to shore up his government by bringing two unpredictable populist parties into a now-defunct coalition has also added to the political farce.
Jokes have centered around the two parties' eccentric leaders: Roman Giertych, head of the ultra-Catholic League of Polish Families and Andrzej Lepper, a pig farmer who heads the nationalist Self-Defense party.
Last month, Giertych and Lepper announced that they were merging to create a new group dubbed LiS, "fox" in Polish. They brought stuffed toy foxes to a news conference to announce their decision.
Since then, political cartoons have lampooned the publicity stunt. A front-page montage in the weekly Wprost showed a smiling Jaroslaw Kaczynski dressed as a hunter, with a dead fox in each hand.
Several figures in Giertych's entourage have also made the headlines.
Giertych's father, Maciej Giertych, a European Parliament lawmaker, has also attracted headlines for denying Darwin's theory of evolution and claiming that humans and dinosaurs lived on earth simultaneously.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS