During the post war period, the anti-communist Polish partisans were engaged in an active struggle with the secret police for seven years and those who fell foul of the system were sent to work camps in Siberia.
Still, according to the Mayor Jaroslaw Siekierko, a bear of a man who stoops as he enters the room, bitterness at the communist era still ran deep. 'That affects how we vote today. People here are strongly anti-communist. We remember our history,' he says from his small office on Ludowa Street.
His office is dominated by a large cabinet filled with trophies for the town's unspecified achievements and a collection of traditional Polish dolls in bright costumes. A plastic owl sits astride a pedestal in the shape of an open book; as the owl stares into middle distance with a wide-eyed look that could be disbelief, incomprehension or admiration, Mayor Siekierko talks about his town.
It has one hospital and five schools and is currently enjoying better economic times. Unemployment has fallen from 10% to 7%, although the Mayor admits that some of this could be attributed to emigration by unskilled workers to Ireland, Britain and Belgium.
The big employer is milk production accounting for 900 local jobs. Exports to the EU, particularly Germany, give the sector a bright outlook. 'Some of those who left in the '90s are coming back and investing in the town, but the society here still feels divided: those who made money during privatisations and those who didn’t.'
At a nearby factory producing silos for grain production (employing 50 locals), he describes the basic ethic of Law and Justice.
'It’s about fighting corruption, and showing the actual situation which exists, declaring how they’re going to change it. There’s also none of the wild selling of Polish institutions or companies. But the main thing is the fight against corruption. You can see the results, even though within two years it's hard to do something. You need years, sometimes generations. But you need to explain it to the Polish people, so that they will really feel their self-worth,' he says.
'It’s not possible for a man to become a millionaire within one year. It’s just not possible to have so much luck. Someone had to help him. American businessmen didn’t get rich in one or two years. They made their money over ten years of hard work. OK, it really can happen once in a while that someone gets very lucky… but I don’t believe in coincidences,' says Mayor Siekierko.
Before lunch - goulash on a fried potato cake served in a soulless service station café with bare walls - we visited the town's vocational school to meet the director. Jozef Sokolik is a pleasant man in a grey suit with a Joycean moustache who does his best to slap down recalcitrant flies feasting on the cream cakes brought for our consumption.
While we found it difficult for workers at the silo factory to open up and talk about their voting intentions – a throwback, said Anna, to communist times when people were genuinely afraid to talk openly about politics. Mr Sokolik was happy to oblige.
The crude urban stereotype of the Law and Justice voter is a ready and available currency for foreign journalists. They are provincial, poorly educated, narrow-minded and deeply conservative. They listen to Radio Maryja, a notorious radio station run by a Catholic priest and accused of broadcasting xenophobic and anti-Semitic messages. They hate the Germans for what they did in the past and fear the Russians for what they might do in the future. They join the Kaczynskis in believing that homosexuals are perverts.
But it is rather uncomfortable applying that cut out version of reality to the real thing when you meet it in the flesh. Jozef’s views on the party, on the past and on the EU were delivered in the school library under the gaze of Polish writers like Joseph Conrad and other stellar figures of European thought like Gustav Flaubert and Tomas Mann.
'I always had beliefs similar to the Law and Justice Party because their programme is the same as the teaching of the church. I’m a religious person, I was raised in a family with strong traditions of patriotism. For sure one of the reasons was that some of my family suffered during the war and during post war period. We never identified ourselves with the system which was imposed on us.
'We’re happy we’re in the EU, it’s a chance for development. You can see it when you look at Ireland. Your experience in the EU has been good for you. We would like the same. But the Polish people have very strong national values and so we were afraid before joining the EU that we would become part of a super state.' he says.
Jozef adheres to a simple, perhaps pious view of the world, but it is hardly offensive. There are two competing ideologies in Poland, a struggle brought into sharp relief by the election and the Kaczynskis’ style and approach. Sunday’s election should show us whether these views are eventually compatible or whether there will be a fight to the death.
- Tony Connelly
