Jaroslaw Kaczynski has announced he will run to succeed his twin bother as president of Poland. While I am aware of spouses attempting to fill the seats of their deceased spouse, I don’t know of a previous instance when a twin has attempted to do this. A key distinction between this case and other attempts at substituting one family member for another following a tragedy is that Jaroslaw Kaczynski is very well known to the Polish public as the head of the Polish Law and Justice party, and as an ex-Prime Minister (2006-2007). Moreover, of late Kaczynski has been distinctly unpopular:
Source: CBOS: Zaufanie de Politykow w Styczniu, Pub: BS/9/2010
The above graph compares his popularity (blue) both to this brother (green) – who was also unpopular but was better liked – and to Bronislaw Komorowski (green), the nominee of the ruling Civic Platform party and the current acting Polish president, over the past year and a half. Based on these numbers, the chances for J. Kaczynski to win the election look slim, so it will be interesting to see if gets any sort of “sympathy bounce”, and/or if this sympathy bounce is mitigated by his previous levels of unpopularity.
Comments on this entry are closed.