For the past two centuries Poland been a key catalyst for political change in Central and Eastern Europe. Even when occupied in the 19th century by neighbouring powers Prussia, Russia and Austria under the partitions, Poland was an inspirational beacon of patriotic insurrection. Its brief sovereign independence between the two World Wars was ended by yet another forced partition, the German-Soviet Pact in 1939.
After Soviet troops liberated Poland from Nazi oppression in 1944, there followed 45 years of Soviet dominance, exercised through puppet local communist governments. But in 1989, a national unified Solidarity democracy movement took peaceful control of Poland from an exhausted communist regime.
Having gained its unified objective of national liberation from communist rule, Solidarity quickly broke up, and its elements re-formed themselves into an array of parties representing various political-social orientations and interests. There has followed 18 years of rather volatile parliamentary democracy, as one unstable coalition has succeeded another.
The key fault-line in Poland has become clear in these years, and it is not a conventional Left–Right faultline. Rather, as in 19th century Russia, the real argument is between 'westernisers' and 'Polonophiles' — the former, people who yearn for liberal Western European style market democracy, and a secular state with the normal Western European rights for women and minorities; and the latter, people with a romantic or sentimental vision of Poland's special destiny as a powerful, populous, strongly anti-Russian, socially conservative Catholic country at the heart of Europe.
Poland's socialists and social democrats have sat uneasily between these polarities, sometimes siding with conservative Catholic welfarism's interest in protecting workers, but sometimes supporting a free market liberal society. Since Lech Walesa, no charismatic party or leader has emerged to represent this 'Third Way'. Some of the original Solidarity leaders are still around, but they are ageing and exhausted.
Worryingly for liberals, in the last few years in Poland, as in other former Communist countries such as Hungary, romantic nationalists have been in the ascendant. Over the past two years, Jaroslaw Kaczynski has been Poland's prime minister; while bizarrely, his identical twin Lech Kaczynski has been president (a position that has considerable prestige and reserve powers). Their Law and Justice Party headed a ruling conservative-nationalist coalition government, which included some rather dubious elements at the fringes.
Now Jaroslaw has been decisively defeated as prime minister, by a coalition headed by 50-year-old Donald Tusk (pronounced 'Toosk'), who leads the Civic Platform Party, a firmly