An election and a referendum

Events just keep happening. Poland went to the voting stations for the second round of the Presidential election and duly brought in the unexpected (at least before the first round) Andrzei Duda of the Law and Order Party. He got 53% of the vote to the outgoing President Komorowski's 47%. Official results will be announced tomorrow when we shall know the turn-out as well.

This is a remarkable and decisive victory for Mr Duda. It's remarkable because he is a relative unknown and Mr Komorowski has been a popular president. It suggests that many Poles have grown weary of President Komorowski's backers, the governing centre-right Civic Platform party.

In its eight years in office the party has maintained Poland's economic growth despite the financial crisis. But it has also reneged on some of its promises and increased the retirement age, an unpopular move.

Poland is gradually catching up to Western Europe's living standards but youth unemployment is high and Poles can still earn much more in the UK or Germany. Many Poles simply do not feel the benefit of 25 years of near uninterrupted growth and Mr Duda appeals to them.

He has promised to bring the retirement age back down, but he'd need his Law and Justice party to win this autumn's parliamentary elections to be able to do that. It's been 10 years since they won an election but many think that may now happen. If it does, judging by its last spell in office in 2005-2007, Poland will become more inward looking and much less at ease with its EU partners.

Why Poles, who just like all others in the developed world live longer and are healthier for longer should want to spend an ever larger proportion of their lives on the scrap heap, living on an inadequate pension is anybody's guess but one can understand why many of them are sceptical about the much-touted economic growth when they look at the huge exodus of the economically active population to the West.

Meanwhile, there was also a referendum in Ireland but this was about same-sex marriage, which was voted through, the first time such a measure has been passed via a plebiscite. What, one wonders, would those Irish writers who have made their names describing a gloomy priest-ridden Ireland have said or, indeed, will say, since many of them are still around.

The actual subject of the plebiscite is of no interest to this blog. But one thing struck me as worthy of comment and that is the huge campaign to bring people who had left to work in other countries (not unknown in Irish history) back to vote or as the hashtag had it: #Hometovote. Many, it seems, responded and took trains and planes and cars and, for all I know, bicycles to do just that, as this ex-pat relates.

It appears that 60.5% of the population, which must include the ex-pats, turned out and 62% of them voted yes to gay marriage. That is pretty decisive. And, undoubtedly, it is very touching that the Irish diaspora who have not the slightest intention of living in Ireland ever again, cared enough to come back to vote but it does raise some questions that we shall have to be dealing with when a very different referendum rolls around. At present anyone who has lived abroad more than a certain number of years has no right to vote here but that might change as the Conservatives have been hinting that they might look at the issue again. Nor is the ex-pat British vote, even at its largest, likely to be such a large percentage of the electorate as it is in the much smaller Ireland. All the same, what about that #Hometovote? How do we feel about it?

Meanwhile in Poland

Britain has once again helped the world by exporting one of its finest traditions: laughing at and lying to pollsters. It is a tradition I rather admire and was a little disappointed in 2010 when, apparently, it was abandoned and the polls, especially the exit polls turned out to be absolutely accurate.

No more. This time round the polls got it completely wrong and even the exit polls were far off the mark as my short blog on the night showed. Excellent. We are back to the wonderful tradition of making clear that we consider pollsters to be a silly joke (though not as silly or as much of a joke as UKIP).

Imagine how please I was to find out that this fine tradition is now being exported from no less a person than Edward Lucas of the Economist (he made it clear on another forum that this is his work).

FIRST Israel, then Britain, and now Poland: lately it seems pollsters cannot get anything right. The Polish presidential elections were once expected to result in a smooth first-round victory for Bronisław Komorowski, the incumbent, who is backed by the ruling centre-right Civic Platform party (PO). Over the course of the campaign his ratings slipped, suggesting that although he was still leading the pack, he would face a second-round runoff against his main rival, Andrzej Duda (pictured) of the conservative Law and Justice party (PiS). Yet as exit polls began filtering in on the evening of May 10th, it became clear that the surveys had all been wrong: Mr Duda had come in first.

Very good. Let us hope some more countries take up this wonderful and rewarding pastime.

However, the upset (perhaps temporary as the system is a complicated and long-drawn out one) in the Polish presidential election is interesting.

Not only it marks the return of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) that was seen to be on its last legs not so long ago but it also shows that Poles do not like to be taken for granted. Not for the first time they seem to be turning against the "acceptable" party and candidate, in this case Bronislaw Komorowski of the Civic Platform (PO).

No champagne corks popped at the president’s election-night event at Warsaw’s national stadium. Within 15 minutes of the final exit-poll announcement, Mr Komorowski had left the room. His supporters shuffled around the coffee machines, wondering what had gone wrong. As of mid-afternoon the next day, with 27 of 51 districts reporting their official results, Mr Duda had 36.7% of the votes, with Mr Komorowski at 31.9%.

There seem to be some other unexpected results for independent candidates as well.

Mr Duda is said to oppose Poland's entry into the euro. an eminently sensible point of view, even if you are in favour of the European Union; he is also supposedly in favour of lowering the retirement age. Now that is not very sensible in the modern world where people live longer and keep their faculties longer. Not only countries cannot afford it (and Poland's economy is not quite as good as one would like it to be as witnessed by the number of people who cannot find jobs there and go abroad to do so) but it seems insane to throw people on the rubbish heap for the last twenty-five, thirty years of their lives.

Of course, this could be a clever ploy to make sure that some of the older workers, on retiring early, also go abroad to get jobs.

Second round on May 24. Then we shall see.

Five years ago

Today is the fifth anniversary of the  crash of the TU-154 in Smolensk, killing all those on board among whom was the President of Poland Lech Kaczynski, his wife and a number of other high-placed military and civilian personnel. They were on their way to take part in a memorial to the victims of Katyn and the crash occurred close to that place. (This blog noted the event at the time.)

There is a good analysis on the BBC Russian Service about the situation with regards to the Smolensk crash at the moment. It is in Russian but if you ask Mr Google nicely he will translate it for you into gobbledygook masquerading as English. Anyway, it will be comprehensible.

On the whole opinion seems to be divided and, as it happens, I was told not so long ago by a Polish lady who lives and works in Britain that many people say that there is something odd about that crash. I pointed out that Russia had nothing to gain from killing Kaczynski who was going to sign an agreement after the Katyn memorial event and, in any case, even if he was not over-popular his death changed nothing. It's not that I cannot imagine the Russian government ordering his murder, I explained but there has to be a reason. The mass murder of Polish officers in 1940 was an eminently rational decision; the bringing down of the TU-154 was not.

For all of that there are many in Poland, particularly supporters of the Law and Justice Party. Others maintain that it was an accident, there being rather a lot of fog at the time. From the very beginning there were rumours that President Kaczynski who was known for high-handed actions and whom pilots disliked intensely insisted on the aeroplane landing where it did despite the dangerous situation.

This week the Polish radio station RMF FM broadcast hitherto unheard recordings from the pilot's cabin that supported that theory with journalists concluding that the President's aides were putting pressure on the pilot to begin his descent to the Smolensk aerodrome, Severny, despite the thick fog. Military prosecutors, on the other hand, pronounced the recording to be unreliable.

Meanwhile the investigation that is being conducted by the Polish military procurator has been extended for another six months. Meanwhile, the country has yet another tragedy to mourn. Anyone would think Polish history was not already full of them.

CORRECTION: I have been told by a journalist friend who has been working on the story that I made a mistake in this account. RMF FM did not broadcast the recordings. Only a "murky and ambiguous" text version was leaked to them, together with some unverified additions. The Polish military prosecutors have insisted that the RFM'a interpretations of the text are inaccurate and taken out of context.

News from Poland

Should we care about a government reshuffle in Poland? I am afraid so, because, as I never tire of saying, their Ministers are part of our real government.

As we know, Donald Tusk is no longer the Prime Minister of Poland, having been elevated to the supremely high position of President of the Council of Ministers. Naturally, that meant a few changes in the Polish government, with Ewa Kopacz as the new Prime Minister and Radek Sikorski, who did not become the EU's Common Foreign Policy High Panjandrum, stepping down (whether by choice or otherwise) as Poland's Foreign Minister as well.

His successor is Grzegorz Schetyna, a 51-year-old former interior minister who recently headed the parliamentary commission for foreign affairs, who is expected "to be conciliatory and soft spoken, in contrast with Sikorski, known for some internationally controversial remarks", which is a roundabout way of saying that Mr Sikorski (no relation to the war-time general and leader of the Polish government in exile until his questionable death) was caught on a mike he had forgotten to check, using language that was a long way from diplomatic.

The Economist, which has a soft spot for Mr Sikorski, is not happy about the choice:

POLAND'S outgoing foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, is a polyglot foreign-policy wonk who helped lead his country to its heftiest international presence in centuries. Grzegorz Schetyna is a party insider who has evinced little interest in international relations, and who, according to his mother, learned his English from the foreign basketball players on a team he used to help run in his native Silesia. But it was Mr Schetyna who was picked to replaced Mr Sikorski as foreign minister on Friday, when Ewa Kopacz, Poland's new prime minister, presented her cabinet (pictured). At a time when Russia is threatening neighbouring Ukraine, even Mr Schetyna's mother, Danuta, says her son was reluctant to take the job.

While I find it a little odd that the Economist, formerly a heavy-weight publication, should bother to interview the new Foreign Minister's mother but, it is a little hard to work out what the new Prime Minister's thinking is.

The Economist provides a fairly rational explanation, which involves the need to balance internal party forces (as well as getting the difficult Mr Sikorski under control).

In taking over the prime minister's job, Mrs Kopacz has had to ensure Mr Schetyna and other party bosses accept her leadership. She has taken care to put other barons besides Mr Schetyna into senior posts, which allows her to act as an arbiter among party factions and to cement her position. Mr Schetyna has already pulled in his horns. He had earlier called for an internal party vote as soon as possible to determine Civic Platform's leader, but now has fallen into line, allowing the vote to be delayed until after next year's parliamentary elections.

In the meantime, Mr Sikorski is being kicked upstairs. He has been given the second most important position on the Polish political scene, though this is not particularly well known internationally: he is to be the Speaker in the Sejm (Parliament), having been accepted as such by the Sejm with 232 votes for, 143 against and 62 abstentions.

I noticed some rumours on Twitter that he is expected to make the Sejm more powerful vis-á-vis the government, taking, as his role model, the British Parliament. Given the recent track record of that venerable institution and, particularly, of the House of Commons, Mr Sikorski will not have to work terribly hard to emulate it.

And here we are again

This week-end saw a wave of protests in Russia against the war with Ukraine and some support for them in the West. I shall blog about it in due course and about the fact that President Putin with his Chekists seem unexpectedly nervous. I am not sure that the news of him signing a "decree restoring the title "Dzerzhinsky Division" to an elite police unit that was previously named after the founder of the Bolshevik secret police" is a sign of defiance or just whistling in the dark. Interesting, nonetheless, but hardly surprising. Perhaps, he, a mid-ranking KGB/FSB officer would like to see himself as a latter day version of Iron Felix.

Meanwhile, President Obama has announced new airstrikes against the "Islamic State" in Syria and the war in the Middle East that he was going to end successfully as it had been entirely President Bush's fault is spiralling out of anybody's control.

Also meanwhile, and unsurprisingly given the situation in eastern Europe, Poland is buying missiles from the US. I have no doubt our Nige will be wagging his finger at them any minute now and telling them that they should stop annoying the Bear. Or some such foolishness.

Democracy

I have just read a collection of essays by Adam Michnik, a man I admire enormously: an historian, a dissident who was imprisoned in Poland, a thinker and somebody who, after the fall of Communism, decided not to fall into the trap of becoming a politician but took on the editorship of Gazeta Wyborcza, though he is now a less than active Editor-in-Chief.

Before I get attacked (something that has not happened for a little while about which I am a little peeved) for talking about politics being a trap, let me point out that in my opinion politics is essential and, sadly, politicians are needed but experience tells one that intellectuals, particularly "public" intellectuals make rotten politicians and tend to incline towards personal authoritarianism.

His latest collection is called The Trouble with History and, having been published first in the Gazeta Wyborcza, has now been translated into English. To some extent it is disappointing: the political essays are of great interest but the historic ones, which seem to be an obsessive analysis of Stendhal and his disgust with post-revolutionary and post-Napoleonic France made me recall how often I have thought of Central European intellectuals as having a somewhat hysterical way of writing and dishevelled way of thinking.

Nevertheless, I do think that book contributes a good deal to our understanding of East European history in the last few decades and gives one food for thought on the subject of democracy and historic attitudes. As such I do recommend it to people. I should also like to know what Polish reaction was to the essays when they were first published. I can see that a few things Michnic writes may not have gone down particularly well with some of his readers.

Unusually I read the Foreword by James Davison Hunter and John M. Owen IV as well and was very glad I had done. Here are a couple of paragraphs from it that might interest people who do not think that democracy consists of elections and nothing else or that elections somehow create democracy.

... contemporary democratic politics can never be understood as only about the interests and actions of political economy or power alone. The moral and ethical dimension of modern democratic politics is intrinsic: not only impossible to disentangle from the actual actions and procedures of the state, but foundational to any government that calls itself democratic. Freedom, tolerance, hope, and respect for human dignity are not secondary, then but primary. As we witness among democratic revolutionaries everywhere, they matter absolutely. Such ideals have made it possible to endure not only the indignities and suffering impsoed by oppressive powers but also, often enough, the world's indifference to their struggle.

The conditions that make for vibrant democracies are fragile; all the more so in populations divided by wealth, race, ethnicity, religion, language, and tribe. Whatever else might be entailed, they require some minimal understandings of justice that are shared and binding across all differences. This is the foundation of any legitimacy a regime can hope for. But those understandings also have to be credibly and consistently approximated within its political institutions and practices. Without those shared commitments and credible enactments, constitutions will become hollow speech acts, emptied of authority and, in the end, a "parchment barrier" to tyranny. Democracy may retain certain formality, but the authority that underwrites it loses its humanizing constraints, leaving a political machinery capable of the crudest expressions of domination on behalf of some factional interests against others.

These are thoughts to be discussed as are some of Adam Michnic's subsequent ones, to which I shall return in other postings.

Mutiny in the ranks?

It seems that some EU members are making their own peacekeeping arrangements though there is no mention on whether our and their masters in Brussels have been consulted.

Kyiv Post reports that Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania are definitely going to create that joint peacekeeping team that they promised to put together last year. That's all very well but are we not all supposed to be working towards the creation of a single (repeat single) EU peacekeeping or whatever keeping force? Do the Lithuanians and the Poles not want to be haring all over Africa making sure that French nuclear companies have enough uranium?

NZWeek adds:

The team will support peacekeeping and humanitarian operations under the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, or multinational coalitions in accordance with the U.N. Charter and the principles of international law.

In fact, almost anything that might involve them in a scrap.

The last Stalinist show trial

Sixty years ago this week, on November 20, 1952, the last of the Stalinist show trials, that against the "Trotskyit, Titoist, Zionist" agents Rudolf Slansky and cohorts, opened in Prague. It lasted several days and at the end eleven of the fourteen accused were condemned to death. They were executed on December 3 and their ashes thrown out of a car onto an icy road because the people in charge could not be bothered to carry them to the appointed destination. Three months later Stalin died and much of the Communist world changed.

On another blog I have written a long piece about the Stalinist purges and trials of post-Second World War Eastern Europe. I can't say enjoy it but I hope people will read it and find it interesting. It is not possible to understand developments in Eastern Europe without knowing something about those events.

A rap on Polish knuckles

The EU has made its unhappiness known to Poland, who are usually very good little Europeans, about a suggestion that a heavy metal group called Behemoth (great name) might prosecuted on the basis of article 196 of Poland's penal code on "the crime of offending religious sensibilities".

It seems that, as part of their performance in 2007, the group's lead singer ripped pages out of the Bible and called the Polish Catholic Church a "murderous cult". It is not clear from the story why it has taken this long for anyone even to threaten a court case but I do like the notion that prosecution for "blasphemy" is against those famous "European values". While I do not think rock musicians should be prosecuted for blasphemy I do wonder where these people get their knowledge of European values, which bear no relation to European history that saw many a prosecution, persecution and execution for blasphemy and other related crimes.

No, they didn't have to learn much

A friend and regular reader of this blog (one of the few not the many) sent me this link with a comment: "How quickly they learn.". The story is that

Brussels-based news agency Euractiv has found that Poland is claiming €33 million of EU carbon allowances for a coal plant in Leczna, near the Ukrainian border, which does not exist. Polish authorities say the plant is being built. But there is zero sign of work at the greenfield site.

Well, no, they didn't have to learn. Back in the days I was still arguing against East European countries coming into the EU I also said that, given their history in the second half of the twentieth century these countries are not going to be fazed by the corruption of the EU. Au contraire: they will take to it like duck to water.

Troubles with that fiscal compact treaty

Poland is being troublesome again. (Not that it ever lasts too long but while they grumble people listen.)

Donald Tusk, Poland's prime minister, is threatening to keep his country out of the nearly-finalised treaty on greater economic discipline, in a dispute over the right to attend eurozone summits.

Poland is insisting that it should be allowed to attend eurozone summits even though it is not expected to adopt the euro for several years. Tusk told Polish radio on Tuesday (24 January): “If Poland does not win an appropriate status of participant in the eurozone meetings, which would give us a feeling that we take part in the decision-making process, ...we will find it difficult to sign the fiscal pact.”

While it is not unreasonable for the Polish Prime Minister to demand those rights but he is not going to get them. Poland is not in the eurozone and that is the way the colleagues will regard the matter. Mr Tusk should have foreseen this problem when he first agreed to the proposed "treaty", which, as we know is not a treaty because that was "vetoed" by the Boy-King.

He has been lecturing the colleagues on something or other at Davos but even now he will not do the right thing and that is demand a full IGC and a completely new treaty. As CNN reports

Hungary, Sweden and the Czech Republic also expressed reservations about treaty change -- but left the door open, pending parliamentary debate.

Whether anything comes of those reservations is a moot point but it is good to know that somebody will have parliamentary debates about the new proposals.

They are all eurosceptics now

Everybody seems to be a eurosceptic these days. Or so they say. The latest one to come out with that odd self-identification was Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. According to the Wall Street Journal,:

“I’m not a euro-enthusiast of the sort that has eyes only on the yellow stars on the blue background, forgetting the white-and-red flag,” he said Saturday, referring to flags of the EU and Poland. “I’m a common-sense euroskeptic, without any unhealthy fascinations.”

It's a little hard to tell what he means by that. After all, we have enough trouble trying to disentangle what our own Tory eurosceptics mean in reality. But, as far as I can tell, he means that as things are not very good in the eurozone at the moment, he does not think Poland should join any time soon but, of course, there is no need to suppose that the eurozone will fall apart and some time in the future, if the conditions are right and there is a good deal of money coming to Poland we shall try again.

Just as in Britain, however, the mention of the word seems to send everyon scurrying for journalistic phrases. A completely uninteresting and meaningless little statement is being described as a "significant about-face". What would happen, I ask myself, if a politician did decide, on the basis of facts to change his or her mind and come out seriously against the whole project.

Polish election

I am taking time out from fruitless discussions with members of the Conservative Party who assure me that a referendum on the EU would hurt the country because "it is the economy, stupid". The referendum on the EU, in my opinion would hurt the eurosceptic cause but would hardly affect the country. I tried the bombard them with question tactics: do these people know how much of our economy is controlled, one way or another, by the EU; have they read the treaties and the various directives and regulations; have they understood Qualified Majority Voting; and so on. The response I got mostly was that we are in this and so we had better stay in for the duration (which is what we are likely to do, sadly) and, anyway, the government has the right idea by fighting for Britain's national interests within the EU. I rest my case: we need an in/out referendum like a hole in the head.

Anyway, I am taking time out to survey other countries. First up, Poland, where parliamentary elections are taking place today. Voice of America reports

Opinion polls in the past week showed Tusk's party favored by 31 percent of respondents, and the opposition conservative Law and Justice Party of former Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski with 21 percent.

Analysts say no party will win an outright majority, and those predicting a Tusk victory say he will likely be forced to form a ruling coalition similar to the one forged with the Peasants' Party after 2007 polls.

Official results are expected by early Monday.

Pre-election polls also indicated that three other parties would also win parliamentary seats in the election. The new socially and economically liberal Palikot Support Movement, the Democratic Left Alliance and the current coalition partner, the Polish People Party.

If Tusk's Civic Platform wins it will be the first time in post-Communist Poland that a party has held power beyond one term.

The BBC thinks that the contest will be fairly close. Reuters agrees. Much depends on the turn-out. According to Polish Radio News things do not look very good:

The National Election Commission has announced that at 18.00 CET, turnout was 39.6 percent, down on the same time, four years ago. Turnout during the 2007 election was officially 53.8 percent.

Polls are about to close, as Poland is one hour ahead of the UK.

UPDATE: Exit polls say that Tusk's party is likely to win though no word yet on the turn-out. Official results expected tomorrow.

A few more updates here. Looks like Civic Platform will be largest party and, probably, the same coalition will be re-negotiated. However, the one to watch is the Palikot Movement that was created last year and has achieved 10 per cent of the vote.

Janusz Palikot, who founded his new party only last year after he left the ruling Civic Platform because he thought they were too socially conservative, was overjoyed at getting 10 percent of the vote, nationwide, according to exit polls.

“This is phenomenal. Eighteen months ago, opinion polls gave the Palikot Movement from one to two percent [in support],” he said tonight.

Palikot has taken votes from socially liberal Civic Platform supporters and the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), support for which has fallen to 7.7 percent from 13 percent in the last elections four years ago.

The Catholic Church may well find that these people are more formidable than Tusk's lot.

Couldn't have put it better myself

Having not blogged about the tiresome tirade by Polish PM Donald Trusk at the start of the Polish Presidency of the EU (July 1) and his attacks on those political leaders who are paying into the kitty that Poland benefits from (well, some of Poland, not the business section, given how many of them are still here as they cannot find employment back home), I can do no better than link to Charles Crawford's excellent analysis. Mr Crawford knows Poland well, having been our man there from 2003 to 2007 and having taken the trouble to learn about the country, its history and its people.

Problems for the Polish government

It would appear that the Polish government's plans to overhaul the pension system is running into difficulties. First, let us have a look at this overhaul:

To curb budget deficits and the growth of debt, the government plans to significantly reduce cash transfers to private pension funds—from 7.3% of employee wages transferred now to just 2.3%. The freed-up cash will go to the state’s pension system, which will operate pension accounts, according to Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The government will be able to cut subsidies to the social security administration, reducing borrowing needs, deficits and debt.

Hmm. Well, there is a phrase for that and it involves the words "state", "grab", "private" and "pensions".

The problems have a good deal to do with the well known inefficiency of the Polish state pension scheme.

It took the state’s pension system years, not weeks or even months, to fine-tune its enormously complicated software system after private pension funds were introduced in 1999. The software—put in place by a private company that it now part of Asseco Poland, Europe’s fifth-largest software vendor by sales—may have been hailed as the best electronic system in European public administration for 2005, but it’s been a bumpy ride.

An even bigger problem is time, or lack thereof. The government wants the new system to operate as of April. This leaves less than three months to get all the necessary laws passed by parliament, approved by the president, printed in the journal of laws, and—most importantly—processed by the byzantine pension organization.

It will need to create additional individual pension accounts for 15 million people. To do that, it needs the specifics of the legislation, which will take many weeks to draft.

To make things worse, the state-run pension system has to lay off 10% of its 50,000 staff.

The process of private pension grabbing freeing up cash for the state-run pension scheme should be interesting to watch.

Well, diddums!

It seems that the newish members of the European Union are once again being discriminated against. The WJS New Europe blog reports that of the 115 EU delegations in different countries (an awful lot really) only 2 are headed by East Europeans, the delegation to Norway is led by a Hungarian and the one to Afghanistan by a Lithuanian. They get the really important ones, you can see. Poland, whose Institute of Foreign Affairs produced the damning report has yet to head a delegation anywhere.

The Polish Institute of International Affairs, a think tank funded by the Polish government, said in a report that in the EU’s external service there were only 36 Poles, a mere 2% of more than 1,700 employees. Poland makes up for almost 8% of the EU’s total population.

Out of 115 heads of EU delegations, there’s one from Hungary, heading the EU’s delegation to Norway, and one from Lithuania representing the bloc in Afghanistan, said the report written by Ryszarda Formuszewicz and Jakub Kumoch.

Taking into account the population factor, there’s overrepresentation of citizens of 11 countries, in particular Belgium, reads the report. Sixteen countries, including Poland, are underrepresented.

As of June, French nationals headed 16 EU delegations. A further 16 ambassadors came from Italy, and 15 from Belgium, a country with a fraction of the population of France, Italy — or Poland.

Surely anyone could have predicted that Belgium would be over-represented.

It gets better:

Women head only 10% of the delegations of the European Union that officially promotes gender equality. Knowledge of foreign languages other than the official languages of the European Union doesn’t seem to play a role in the selection process, and thus the head of the EU delegation to Moscow doesn’t speak Russian, and the ambassador to Ukraine doesn’t speak Ukrainian or Russian, according to the report.

I wonder if the system was devised by the FCO.

Bronislaw Komorowski wins

It was a tight race but Bronislaw Komorowski of the Civic Platform party has won it. The markets, according to the Financial Times are reasonably happy as they think that the necessary economic reforms will now be put into place and not be vetoed.

The article also has a summary of what is happening to currencies in other Central and East European countries.

There will be a run-off

The news this morning is that although Poland's Parliamentary Speaker, Bronislaw Komorowski, is leading his opponent in the country's presidential election, the late Kaczynski's identical twin, Jaroslaw, he has not acquired the necessary 50 per cent of the vote. Therefore, there will be a run-off in two weeks' time.

AP reports:

Based on more than 94 percent of voting stations reporting, Komorowski had 41.22 percent of the votes and Kaczynski had 36.74 percent, the State Electoral Commission said. Turnout there was 54.85 percent.

The low turn-out is a little surprising, given the circumstances. Full results are expected later today.

Smolensk brings more bad luck to Poles

As Konstantin Kosachyov, the chairman of the Duma's International Affairs Committee, put it: Katyn has claimed yet more Polish victims. Just a few days after the two prime ministers, of Poland and Russia, commemorated the dead of Katyn (and other places) thus acknowledging officially that the Polish officers were murdered by the Soviets not the Nazis, President Kaczynski was killed on his way to the commemoration in the Smolensk forest. He, his wife and other official visitors were on a twenty-year old TU-154 when it crashed. There were no survivors. The Telegraph has an obituary.

UPDATE: AP reports that the total number of dead is 96 and describes scenes of national mourning throughout the country. The Russians seem to be in shock and Prime Minister Putin is taking over the investigation personally, which is not usually a sign that anything very useful will be done. This, however, is a huge international event and not the murder of a Russian journalist or human rights activist. It is also a source of huge embarrassment for Russia with the geographic and temporal symbolism of Katyn ever present in everybody's mind.

A strange but welcome development

According to the BBC President Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has invited Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to the seventieth commemoration of Katyn in April. Putin has been known to dodge hither and thither in the minefield of Soviet history and this development is a peculiar one, given how much emphasis has been placed recently on the whiter than white record of the Soviet Union and the Red Army in the Second World War. The mass murder of Polish officers in Katyn and other places and the deportation of civilians, many to their death, did not actually involve the army but the NKVD in the ranks of whose successors, the KGB and the FSB Vladimir Putin served.

According to RFE/RL President Kaczynski plans to attend the ceremony as well, though he has not, as yet, been invited by his counterpart, President Medvedev. What will Putin's teddy bear do about it all? Is he being outflanked on the subject of criticism of Soviet crimes?