In the spotlight: Krzysztof Kononowicz

In its first four days on the viral-video website, his election spot was viewed more than 2.3 million times. Kononowicz, the candidate of the 21st Century Podlasie electoral committee, who has been unemployed for 12 years and boasts of his "wooden bungalow," became the talk of the town (or rather, the country) when he presented his platform by reading it from a piece of paper in grammatically-disjointed, thickly-regional Polish while wearing a patterned sweater which conjured the zeitgeist of Poland's late 1980s. Kononowicz promised that if he is elected "there will be no banditry, no thievery, there will be nothing" and that he would "liquidate alcohol, cigarettes and drugs for the young people." Apart from that, he promised to build roads, open factories and, "unlike other politicians," keep his promises.

Kononowicz got 1,676 votes in Białystok, which amounted to 1.9 percent of the vote, and managed to beat Self-defense's candidate. The fact that so few people voted for him could be interpreted as a sign of Polish democracy's slow maturation. Slow indeed, if such candidates can still muster votes enough to beat candidates from national parties.