Is Kaczyński on his way to the Namiestnikowski Palace?

By Chris Mularczyk

Lech Kaczyński has been billed as "the" candidate of the center-right in the coming presidential elections. His past as head of the Supreme Chamber of Inspection (NIK) and his popularity as justice minister are supposed to make him the most promising candidate the right can produce.

Certainly his thrashing of the hapless Andrzej Olechowski in the Warsaw mayoral elections only strengthened the feeling that Kaczyński is the front-runner. Taken together with the advances his party, PiS, has made, and the problems endured by the PO, you have to accept him as the favorite to take on the left in 2005.

But being mayor of Warsaw is threatening all that. Despite the grand title of President of Warsaw, Kaczyński can only count on round-the-clock media coverage in Warsaw itself. Unfortunately for him, he is becoming increasingly invisible in the national media. This is because he is out of the Sejm and out of the picture as far as running PiS is concerned. Local government leaders are still not regarded as center-stage characters in this country.

Worse still is the fact that his term of office in the Ratusz is not going well. PR stunts - such as the testing of heating on Warsaw buses - notwithstanding, Kaczyński is failing to make much impact. His suspicious nature is leading to some pathological conditions, which are undermining his political future:

a) He refuses to decentralize any power to the 18 district tiers of government. As a result, a bottleneck is opening up of decisions awaiting central acceptance by President Kaczyński and his merry men.

b) Kaczyński wants to avoid any tenders because he fears that they may end up hurting him. His staff are not really experienced and he does not trust them anyway, a perfect recipe for inaction.

c) Kaczyński has taken the problem of Warsaw's indebtedness to heart. As a result, he is stopping investments throughout the city. The problem with this bookkeeping approach to the financial management of a major city is that it slows down development and deprives the city of future sources of income. Instead of looking for major savings, he is concentrating on cutting development.

d) Kaczyński hates privatization. He suspects all privatizations of being potential scandals and fire sales of public property. Again, it is mainly because the people around him have little experience in the matter. The lack of privatization means that it is harder to get savings and development in place.

e) Despite trying very hard, he has not been able to find any major dirt on his PO predecessors in the Ratusz. Some stories have emerged about extravagance and mismanagement of city promotion activities, but it is pretty tame stuff compared to the promises we were made of a major investigation into the past. Maybe Kaczyński's people are not experienced enough to know where and how to look.

Kaczyński said that his presidency in Warsaw would be a test of whether he and his people could change the way Poland is run. If we take his period in office as a guide, we can assume that a Kaczyński-style government would centralize power, stop privatization and put off as many decisions as it can. Sound familiar? It is exactly the kind of government we already have.

The only bright spot in all of this for Lech Kaczyński is that his party has done reasonably well of late as a result of scandals such as Rywingate. These scandals play well with PiS's emphasis on fighting corruption. The SLD has countered with FOZZ, but then that is very old hat and there is still no shred of real evidence linking the Kaczyńskis with that kind of dirt.

The problem is that this advance in the polls may be elusive. The local elections showed that PiS only performs well in large cities. This is because the party totally lacks an effective regional organization, which is a result of the Kaczyńskis' obsessive centralization and mistrust of any autonomy for local organizations. The party is hand-picked and, therefore, too small.

Kaczyński's reign as president of Warsaw is not helping him in his build-up to the presidential elections. His lack of tangible successes will sooner or later become a debating point in the media. Questions will be asked whether a man who is not succeeding as president of Warsaw could possibly succeed as president of the country. The voters may decide that, despite their respect for him on issues such as law and order, they want someone else as president.