Poland's prickly twins grab reins of power
WARSAW (Reuters) - Polish conservative leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski, shot to fame playing rookie lead characters in a 1962 hit "The Two Who Stole the Moon."
On Saturday, the former child stars and anti-communist activists, 57, stood on the threshold of capturing unprecedented power in the ex-communist European Union country as Jaroslaw prepared to become the next prime minister.
He will replace party colleague Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, a moderate junior leader of the ruling Law and Justice party, who is likely to resign formally on Monday.
If Jaroslaw is confirmed by parliament next week, Poland will become the only country in the world with identical twins as head of state and government -- a field day for satirists for whom the portly, prickly and grim-faced politicians are already favorite targets.
A combative, all-or-nothing style has long been the hallmark of the Kaczynskis, at one time pushing them and their traditionalist party close to political extinction before their triumphant comeback in last year's elections.
In the 1962 movie, which is a hit again, the twins played angelic, if mischievous, blond boys dressed in rags. In one scene making the rounds on the Internet, one of them tells the other that if they stole the moon, they would not have to work.
"We don't do much anyway," comes the reply. "Yes, but now we could do nothing at all," the other shoots back.
SOLIDARITY ACTIVISTS
In politics, they emerged as Solidarity activists in the 1980s and after the fall of communism, the ambitious, strong-willed brothers acted as behind-the-scene power brokers.
In Poland's first free presidential elections in 1990, they were the driving force behind Solidarity hero Lech Walesa's victory but quickly fell out with the iconic leader.
By the mid-1990s, their quarrels on the right of the political scene earned them a reputation as people who kept destroying their own creations. In a 1993 survey Jaroslaw was rated the country's "biggest political loony." Lech came second.
The brothers were close to leaving politics altogether until Lech was offered the post of justice minister in a Solidarity-run government in the late 1990s, winning popularity thanks to his tough-on-crime stance.
He went on to become a mayor of Warsaw, stemming corruption at the city hall but earning the scorn of human rights groups and the European Union for banning gay parades.
By promising to curb corruption, spend more on the poor and conduct more assertive foreign policy, he and Jaroslaw robbed a moderate conservative party, the Civic Platform, of what looked like certain victory in the 2005 polls.
But their new-found popularity soon plunged when they forged an awkward ruling alliance with fringe nationalists and leftists, clashed with journalists and judges and raised tensions with the EU and Russia.
Diplomats point out that Jaroslaw, a eurosceptic who seldom travels abroad and is suspicious of business, has never held a major office and is untested on the international stage.
A bachelor, unlike Lech who is married with a daughter, Jaroslaw cannot drive and lives with his mother and their cat -- facts that make him a butt of jokes in Poland and abroad.
