Voters in Poland will pick a new parliament Sunday, and the fate of one of Europe's most unusual political lineups hangs in the balance.
The country's president and prime minister are twin brothers and their coalition with extreme right parties collapsed halfway through its four year term.
The campaign has been short, with parties using mostly television and billboards to reach voters.
Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski's Law and Justice party and the leading opposition party, Civic Platform, have been jockeying for leadership in opinion polls.
A prime time debate last week pushed Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk ahead in several polls. The third major contender is the Democratic Left Alliance, called in Poland simply the ex-communists.
Some Voters Undecided
Slawomir Radziwanowski and his wife, Patricia Tutska, watched the debate in their spacious house in Gdansk, on Poland's northern Baltic Sea coast.
Tutska supports Tusk's opposition Civic Platform party, because "nothing has been done," in the two years the Law and Justice party has been running the government. "Nothing, except for noise and arguments," she says. "For taxes, for health care, nothing has been done."
Her husband is not sure who he will vote for Sunday, but definitely not the Kaczynski's Law and Justice party. He is a marketing director and he is unimpressed with Prime Minister Kaczynski's style of governance and debate.
"He's talking like he talks to his supporters," says Radziwanowski, commenting on the prime minister's performance during the debate. Radziwanowski calls these supporters "people who are uneducated and uninformed" and Kaczynski "a demagogue."
Law and Justice won a majority in the Polish parliament two years ago — the same time Jaroslaw's twin brother, Lech Kaczynski, won the presidency.
Jaroslaw has been prime minister for just over a year and is considered the party's mastermind. Law and Justice partnered in government with two small, far right parties. Scandals and accusations of corruption tore the coalition apart. But political commentator Rafal Ziemkiewicz says Prime Minister Kaczynski started a revolution.
"He was the first person on political stage who was talking about some obvious problems," says Ziemkiewicz. .
In particular, the problems of people who feel they have not benefited from the country's transition to democracy and a capitalist economy.
Critics of the Kaczynskis say they have the divided the country, but Ziemkiewicz thinks that is absurd.
"How the politician can divide a nation?" he asks. "The nation is divided, and the job of a politician is to read this division and make something with that. Jaroslaw Kaczynski is this politician," says Ziemkiewicz. "He read it correctly, I think."
Brothers Appeal to Polish Pride
Ziemkiewicz says the prime minister also tapped into Polish pride by taking an aggressive stance on European issues, such as voting rights in a new treaty among the member states and European Union relations with Russia.
But Stephen Bastos with the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin suggests the Kaczynski brothers' style does not match the rest of Europe.
"The whole political approach they have, confrontation and really hard negotiations, this is one part of the European game," Bastos says. "But other part is compromise and cooperation. And they have pretty much difficulties in understanding that."
Bastos cheerfully predicts the vote Sunday will give Berlin and Brussels someone new to talk to in Warsaw.
But Andrzej Stankiewicz, political reporter for Newsweek magazine, is not quite ready to write Law and Justice's obituary. Over coffee in a downtown Warsaw café, he says this is one of the most important elections in Polish history because the differences between the Law and Justice party and the biggest opposition group, Civic Platform, are stark.
"This election will show which direction Poland will go for the next four years," Stankiewicz says. "And these four years are fundamental."
Some of the decisions ahead include whether to drop the Polish zloty as the country's currency and join the euro-zone. There are also disagreements over Poland's commitment to keeping troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. And a massive infrastructure project geared toward Poland co-hosting the European Cup soccer championships in 2012 will need sound government management.
No party is expected to win enough votes to rule alone and coalition negotiations could be long and unpredictable. But even if the prime minister loses his job, his brother will still be president.
Lech Kaczynski's term ends in 2010.
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