Polish president Lech Kaczynski: a profile

Polish president Lech Kaczynski is feared dead after his plane crashed while travelling to Russia. 

agreements signed last summer Photo: AP

The Smolensk plane crash brings to an end the life of one of the dominant forces of Polish politics.
Lech Kaczynski, as either president or party politician, stamped his name on the Polish political scene to become one of the most influential and powerful men in the country, earning a reputation for being a sharp and shrewd political operator.
He was also a man happy to court controversy.
Exhibiting a prickly sense of nationalism that brought him into frequent conflict with Donald Tusk, the prime minister, the 60-year-old president also faced accusations of siding with his identical twin brother Jaroslaw, the leader of Poland's main opposition party, to foil the government's reform programme.
Along with his twin, President Kaczynski cut his political teeth by joining Lech Walesa's Solidarity trade union in the fight against communism. With the fall of the socialist state in 1989 he briefly served in the office of then president Lech Walesa, before Mr Walesa fired him.
His sacking sparked a long and bitter battle with the former Solidarity leader that tainted the rest of Lech Kaczynski's political career. He became convinced that the Nobel Prize winner had, by striking an agreement with Poland's last communist government, sold out the Solidarity revolution, and allowed elements of the socialist state's security apparatus to live on.

It was the belief that Poland needed to clean its house of the remnants of communism that led to Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski to form the Law and Justice Party in 2001. Along with trumpeting a socially conservative agenda, the party promised to crack down on corruption and purge Poland of the unwanted traces of the socialist state.
After serving as mayor of Warsaw for three years, in October 2005 Lech Kaczynski triumphed in presidential elections to become Poland's head of state. When Law and Justice won the Polish general election a month later, ushering Jaroslaw into the prime minister's office, Poland found itself in the unusual situation being run by identical twins.
In an attempt to downplay the fact that twins occupied the two most powerful posts in Polish politics, Lech and Jaroslaw, who many had trouble telling apart, were rarely seen together in public, and bridled when people referred to them as a single political entity rather than individuals.
After Law and Justice was defeated in general elections in 2007, President Kaczynski found himself in a bitter battle with Donald Tusk, the new prime minister. A series of very public clashes between the two men over who controlled Polish foreign policy prompted the prime minister to suggest changes to the Polish constitution to limit presidential power.
The government also complained of President Kaczynski's frequent use of the presidential veto, which stalled a series of key reform programmes.
President Kaczynski was due to fight for re-election this year in October.