WARSAW — It was 9:30 at night, under a chilly, steady rain. The Presidential Palace glowed brightly in the background as a cluster of men and women huddled under umbrellas, saying prayers, holding small wooden crosses against their bodies, facing a large picture of Jesus Christ on the cross and a lighted statue of the Virgin Mary.
Agencja Gazeta/Reuters
During a memorial service in Warsaw on Nov. 10, people touched a monument inscribed with the names of victims of the April plane crash that killed dozens of Poland’s leaders.
They had come to protest against the president, Bronislaw Komorowski, and the prime minister, Donald Tusk, in a vigil that began in the early days after a plane crash in April that killed Lech Kaczynski, then the president, and his wife and dozens of the nation’s top political and military leaders.
As the days have turned into weeks and now months, as their demands have shifted from keeping a cross outside the Presidential Palace to building a permanent monument to replacing the president, their nightly vigil has come to represent the deep social and political cleavages threatening to derail one of the great success stories of the former Soviet bloc, a number of people here said in a series of recent interviews.
Perhaps surprisingly, Poles actually have sound reasons to celebrate: they have navigated the treacherous transition from Communism better than most of the post-Soviet satellite nations, and theirs is the only country in Europe to have avoided a recession during the financial crisis.
Instead, they are feeling insecure, pessimistic and uncertain about the future, and they have turned on one another.
“We have a beautiful face in tough times and during difficult moments, but in normal times, we are lost,” said Jan Oldakowski, an opposition member of the Parliament who was one of several members of the opposition Law and Justice Party to recently quit the party to form a more centrist coalition. “With freedom, Poles do not know how to cooperate with each other.”
27/11/2010, 16:58
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