Alex Orr: Polish air disaster will have big effect on country's political agenda

THE death in a plane crash at Smolensk on Saturday of Polish president Lech Kaczynski, together with the cream of the nation's conservative opposition and the entire command of the armed forces, will have a dramatic impact on the nation's politics.

Mr Kaczynski, together with his twin brother Jaroslaw, was a divisive character within Poland and in Europe. The twins pushed unashamedly for conservative values and a righting of historical wrongs with 20th-century foes Russia and Germany in ways that ruffled feathers and often seemed out of step with the times.

Yet with Mr Kaczynski's passing, even political foes recognise that the country's political scene has been left with a vacuum, although one that could simplify life for the current Civic Platform government. The loss to Poland's conservatives goes far beyond Mr Kaczynski. Also on the plane was the head of the National Security Bureau, Aleksander Szczygo, as well as other key advisers to Mr Kaczynski and prominent party leaders.

While former president Lech Walesa had fallen out with Mr Kaczynski, he recognised the scale of the tragedy when speaking on television, stating that it was second after Katyn – the 1940 slaughter of more than 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD, precursor of the KGB. The irony that Polish leaders were wiped out at they travelled to attend the 70th anniversary of this massacre has been deeply felt by Poles, and one result of the crash, could be an improvement in the troubled relationship between Poland and Russia, who have fought bitterly over interpretations of Second World War history in recent years.

The crash is likely to have a lopsided effect on Polish domestic politics, leaving the conservative Law and Justice Party with no obvious candidate for presidential elections. These were to have been held in September or October, but will now need to be moved to June at the latest. The candidate for the left-of-centre Democratic Left Alliance, deputy speaker of parliament, Jerzy Szmajdzinski, was also on the plane when it crashed.

Mr Kaczynski had been expected soon to announce he would run for re-election, leaving his more driven and controversial twin brother free to take the powerful post of prime minister, if their Law and Justice Party should return to power. The key will now be what Jaroslaw Kaczynski will decide to do, and if he will run for the presidency.

The deaths have proven a tremendous blow for the opposition, with those killed being the elite and brains of the party. By the same token the tragedy could prove a boon to the centre-right government of Donald Tusk, whose ruling Civic Platform party was already in pole position to win the presidential elections.

The Kraczynski brothers' Law and Justice Party won elections in 2005, on a promise to build a new "Fourth Republic" in Poland, and the arrival of the identical Polish twins on the stage of the European Union, which Poland had only just joined in 2004, came as a shock to an organisation driven by consensus and careful scripting. For example, the twins compared a German-Russian deal to build a direct gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea with the 1939 non-aggression pact in which Hitler and Stalin agreed to carve up Eastern Europe.

Should Civic Platform be successful at the presidential elections it will represent a potentially more liberal and outward looking agenda for Poland, building closer relations with the EU and Russia and taking a tougher line with the US.

The plane crash has had a fundamental impact on Polish politics, and is an issue that will not only take some time to resolve, but will profoundly influence Poland's domestic political and foreign relations agenda.

• Alex Orr is a board member of the European Movement