While western Poland develops fast, the conservative east of the country faces a slower path to prosperity, writes Derek Scallyin Bialystok
If the hulking, red-brick building was a shopping centre, property agents would rave about the "heavy footfall". But it's not a shopping centre, it's the Church of the Assumption in the eastern Polish city of Bialystok on a chilly midweek morning. Daily mass is long over, but a stream of people continue to pass through the double doors, their wooden panels worn smooth by decades of devout hands. Outside, posters of politicians with beseeching smiles - profane variations on the holy pictures inside - remind the faithful of Sunday's election.
Nationally, the result will be a close call, but here in Bialystok it appears to be a foregone conclusion. Last time around, despite Poland's fragmented political landscape, one in three voted for the Law and Justice (PiS) party of twin brothers Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski. This time, the party is aiming for 40 per cent. In surrounding villages, the Kaczynski vote topped 80 per cent, offering little room for improvement.
To western ears - western Poland just as in western Europe - the Kaczynski message is a crude rant, against Germany, the EU and winners of Poland's transformation process, with neither message nor messenger to be taken seriously. But the Kaczynskis take themselves seriously, as do their voters in Bialystok who find comfort in their message and thus made their city the unofficial capital of Kaczynskiland. Why? Bialystok has had it all: wartime terror and destruction, occupation by the Nazis, the Soviets and the Nazis again. Redrawn post-war borders pushed it to the periphery of a country snatched by Moscow and held for four decades behind the Iron Curtain.
In the years since the fall of communism, Bialystok has lost out again, as Warsaw and more westerly Polish cities attracted the headlines and investment, the tourists and even Bialystok's own young people. Lately, the young people have moved further west, to Britain and Ireland, their visits home even less frequent.
Its peripheral location compounds the weak investment and, consequently, unemployment of nearly 18 per cent. Walking around, it is clear that Bialystok lacks the flair and confidence so many other Polish cities have gained in recent years. Where the skies of Warsaw and Poznan are a haze of cranes, just one crane stands on the Bialystok skyline, like an exotic tree. It would be natural to expect voters to turn on every government that has tried and failed to tackle the region's problems. But not in Kaczynskiland. With Belarus just 50km (30 miles) down the road, this is as far as you can get in Poland from western newspapers with mocking caricatures and angry editorials about the portly Kaczynski twins.
THE STREAM OF people leaving the church - lively, friendly characters - are, without exception, all enthusiastic PiS voters. Listening to them talk, it's hard to know where their own opinion ends and Kaczynski-speak begins, so seamless is the join.
"The party is going to change Poland, the others are a lying bunch," says Sabine Salyga, a cheery 70-year-old with a knitted cap and a slight hunchback. "PiS politicians are true Poles who go to church and listen to the good radio and read good papers." Salyga's words could have been lifted from the "good" broadcasts of Radio Maryja, the broadcaster of prayers and Kaczynski propaganda, or the "good" pages of its sister newspaper, the ultra-Catholic daily Nasz Dziennik.
Founded in 2001, Law and Justice won the 2005 election, narrowly beating the liberal Civic Platform (PO) with a programme of right-wing social conservatism and left-wing welfare policies, topped with a vow to tackle endemic corruption. Like the PO, PiS can trace its pedigree back to Poland's Solidarity trade union, which set in train the events that led to the collapse of communism across Europe. In Bialystok, however, voters believe the PiS claim to be the sole, true heir of Solidarity.
"The PO chose the wrong way," says Jan Cylwicki, a lively 62-year-old outside the church. The "wrong way" is the PO's pro-market liberalism and its consideration of a coalition with the post-communist left.
"Our message is coming over well. After mass people are barely taking the PO leaflets," remarks Mariusz Kaminski, a PiS councillor in Bialystok. "People like Jaroslaw Kaczynski here because he is a strong man, his motto is 'action not words'. He's not interested in power itself but the power to change Poland."
It is immaterial whether PiS ideology originated in Jaroslaw Kaczynski's bleeding heart or in a political focus group: its messages are in keeping with eastern Poland's sensibilities. A strong Poland, paranoia about Russia and the EU, caring conservativism cobbled together with slogans copied from the left and right - it strikes a chord with the many people in the region resentful that others have fared better in post-communist Poland.
FURTHER WEST, POLES ridicule the rigmarole. On the train from Berlin, a businessman from Poznan dubs Kaczynski a "manufacturer of hope". But by tapping into the myth of the Polish patriot, Kaczynski has created a unique political virtual reality for himself. While other European politicians are motivated by the rewards of success and fear of failure, political failure for Kaczynski is just another option, even a preferred alternative: in Polish history, glorious failure has a greater precedent than success - and someone else is always to blame.
Bialystok PO candidate Jacek Zalek (34) is one of the young people who stayed, though he often wonders why. The decline of industry and infrastructure has sapped the dynamism from Bialystok, he says.
"PiS is, simply put, a phenomenon in this region," he says in his living room between sips of tea. "It gives hope of solving problems by promoting passiveness among people with no aspirations in life. They have no work and so cannot see its positive effects - working and solving their own problems."
The core Kaczynski vote - elderly, poorly educated churchgoers - will remain true and will vote tomorrow. But even deep in Kaczynskiland, the party cannot be as sure of younger voters such as Bogomil Wasilewski, a lawyer who voted for PiS in 2005.
"I was hoping for some fresh air, that they would make it easier to do business," he says. "But they didn't. People didn't even dare do simple things because it required a huge bureaucratic machine. It's like a rising wave of mud that covers you."
According to Wasilewski, the PiS mayor of Bialystok kept a stranglehold on business and a stalemate on investment, creating perfect soil for PiS seeds of discontent.
But local elections last year, and the election of a PO mayor, changed everything, he says. Business restrictions were loosened and new projects started. The biggest of them, the 15,000m2 Galeria Podlaska shopping centre, is managed by Wasilewski and is funded by the Irish investor Spirit International. Opening next month, it is one of Bialystok's first new shopping centres in 11 years.
After tomorrow's election only time will tell if the out-of-town shopping centre, welcomed by local PO politicians and opposed by PiS officials, can compete for footfall with the Church of the Assumption. If so, Bialystok's status as capital of Kaczynskiland might be in doubt.