How Grief Of Twin Reshapes Poland

WARSAW — For six weeks in 2010, Jaroslaw Kaczynski kept up the charade. By day, he appeared at political rallies in mourning clothes as a standin for his twin brother, Lech, who had been running for a new term as Poland’s president before he died in a plane crash in Smolensk, Russia. By night, he went to the bedside of his ailing mother and told her Lech was on a trip to Peru and Argentina.

Only after his mother had recovered did Jaroslaw Kaczynski tell her what had really happened. “There were moments that I wanted to believe those stories myself,” Mr. Kaczynski said in a rare interview the year after the crash. “That Lech was alive.”

Eight years later, Mr. Kaczynski is the dominant political figure in Poland. His Law and Justice party has eroded democratic freedoms and weakened the rule of law in Poland, while pushing the country into an acrimonious dispute with the European Union.

The confrontation between Warsaw and Brussels is a challenge for a European Union already under siege from anti- establishment parties across the Continent — partly because of Poland’s economic and military importance, partly because of the blow of seeing a country once synonymous with democratic yearning turn the opposite way.

It is also part of a pattern in Central and Eastern Europe, where Mr. Kaczynski has formed an alliance with Hungary and its populist leader, Victor Orban. Their nationalist rhetoric has found emulators. Europe’s leaders will soon gather in Brussels to discuss whether Poland should be penalized for changes to its judicial system that many experts say undermine the rule of law. Failure to take action may embolden nations like Slovakia and Romania that are flirting with their own brands of “illiberal democracy.”

From the moment of his brother’s death, Mr. Kaczynski has nurtured a mythology of martyrdom and aggrieved nationalism around the Smolensk crash, using the tragedy to try