The Kaczynski twins promised change for Poland, but their government has been notable only for high farce, reports Daniel McLaughlin.
What started out as Poland's "moral revolution" has, in less than two years, descended into a grubby political farce that early elections will probably bring to an end this autumn.
Life in Poland has not been dull under the Kaczynski twins, former child actors who vowed to purge public life of corruption and ex-communists, but it has also brought pitifully few positive results to European Union's largest new member.
And instead of dragging Polish politics from the mire into which it sank under the previous leftist government, the Kaczynskis' coalition has been dogged by incompetence and corruption, while they have infuriated Poland's most powerful friends and neighbours.
"I was just in the Caribbean, and everywhere people know what's going on in Poland, and everywhere they are making fun of us," former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa said this month. "Even abroad the Kaczynski brothers are perceived as a source of unrest. If the prime minister cannot take advantage of what he has, he should step down."
When Walesa was Poland's president in the early 1990s, he fired the Kaczynskis over what he called their constant paranoia. That was around the time that a reader survey in a national newspaper saw Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the current prime minister, crowned "Poland's biggest political loony"; his identical twin Lech, the current president, came in second. The twins wandered the political wilderness for several years before forming the Law and Justice Party in 2001, on a platform that appealed to the millions of Poles who had not benefited from the transition to market democracy and suspected that a malign network of ex-communists was running the country for personal profit.
Seen as incorruptible defenders of the poor and good Polish patriots, their popularity soared as the government led by the Democratic Left alliance (SLD) stumbled from one scandal to the next.
WHILE JAROSLAW, THE party's chief strategist and ideologue, planned its route to power, Lech was using his position as mayor of Warsaw to cement a reputation as a no-nonsense nationalist and staunch Catholic, banning the city's gay parade, building a major museum to commemorate the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against Nazi occupiers, and presenting Germany with a €45 billion bill for wartime damage done to the Polish capital.
The SLD was routed in the September 2005 elections, and Law and Justice snatched a narrow victory from the pre-vote favourite Civic Platform (PO), a liberal, centre-right party; a month later, Lech won the presidency, and the Kaczynskis had full control of Poland at a time of huge opportunity fuelled by billions of euro flowing in from Brussels.
Poland's biggest EU partners were always queasy about the Kaczynskis, however.
They squirmed when Jaroslaw said gays should not teach in schools, and were appalled when Law and Justice scrapped coalition talks with the PO in favour of an alliance with the populist Self Defence party and the League of Polish Families (LPR), the former run by a brusque ex-pig farmer hostile to the EU, and the latter by the scion of a nationalist political dynasty who has been accused of anti-Semitism and homophobia.
The coalition teetered on the brink of collapse for most of its short lifetime, sustained by rows, sackings, reinstatements and constant threats of early elections, prompting critics to accuse the Kaczynskis of keeping Poland in a state of constant crisis to distract from their lack of real policy or to cast themselves as pillars of stability in a storm.
The alliance was never stable and always liable to farce: Andrzej Lepper, the leader of Self Defence, fought off accusations of demanding sex in return for party jobs only to fall to allegations of corrupt business deals; and LPR chief Roman Giertych wanted schools to end anti-homophobia campaigns and introduce patriotism classes, while one of his chief deputies called for an investigation into whether Tinky Winky, the apparently male Teletubby who carries a red lady's handbag, may have dangerous "homosexual undertones".
UNDER THE WEIGHT of growing humiliation and internal rancour, the coalition finally collapsed last week, but Jaroslaw Kaczynski refused to take responsibility for the partners that he chose.
Saying the Law and Justice-only cabinet was now "intellectually and morally stronger", Kaczynski claimed he had formed the coalition in the hope that "our partners would use a great chance to change their sometimes rash actions into the work for Poland, that they will accept our rules and be ready to act honestly".
"Unfortunately it turned out to be an illusion, there was no such readiness," he concluded - something that millions of Poles could have predicted two years ago.
"The alliance with populists robbed Kaczynski . . . of the aura of uncompromising honesty," wrote Robert Krasowski, editor in chief of right-wing newspaper Dziennik, which is generally sympathetic to the twins. "An alliance with people of crummy reputation, as Kaczynski himself once described them, has attached a stigma of the grotesque to the 'moral revolution' slogan."
Having introduced laws to purge former communists from public life and the intelligence services, however, the Kaczynskis have also presided over a "moral revolution" that regularly devours its own.
The latest high-profile victim was former interior minister Janusz Kaczmarek, a long-time ally of the twins who was sacked this month for allegedly giving Lepper details of the corruption investigation against him.
Kaczmarek, who says he has been placed under surveillance and had his house searched, responded by saying: "We live in a totalitarian state." The Kaczynskis have sacked anyone who resisted their methods or showed signs of independent thinking or popularity, including Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, the man Jaroslaw Kaczynski replaced as prime minister in July 2006.
AS LECH WALESA claimed more than a decade ago, the twins appear obsessed by conspiracy and see all dissent as treachery: Jaroslaw even admitted recently that he doesn't keep his savings in an account because he doesn't trust banks, preferring instead to keep his cash at home, where he still lives with his mother and pet cats.
Internationally, the Kaczynskis are openly mistrustful of Poland's traditional enemies, Germany and Russia, whose deal to build a Baltic gas pipeline bypassing Poland was compared by Warsaw to the wartime pact sealed by Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.
Berlin was similarly unimpressed when Lech Kaczynski withdrew at the last moment from his first summit meeting with the German and French presidents.
His office cited digestive problems, but Polish media said he was actually upset by a German newspaper article calling the twins "Poland's new potatoes", and reminding Lech that he once boasted of having "never extended even a fingernail towards a German politician" and of knowing nothing about the country beyond "the spittoon in the toilets at Frankfurt airport".
The Kaczynskis blame left-wing control of the media for their poor press, and claim credit for presiding over a period of economic growth and falling unemployment, even though they have done little to encourage the former and the latter is partly attributable to the migration of hundreds of thousands of young Poles to Ireland and the UK.
Surveys suggest Law and Justice would lose an autumn election - a result that would be quietly welcomed in many European capitals.
The twins have also clashed with perhaps their most powerful domestic backer, Catholic media boss Fr Tadeusz Rydzyk, who was heard berating the president and his wife in a leaked tape; and if parliament sanctions an investigation into alleged attempts to frame Lepper, more heads may roll among the twins' closest allies.
"They didn't know how to show that they knew how to govern," says Lena Kolarska-Bobinska, the director of Warsaw's Institute of Public Affairs. "The government has fallen apart and it's chaos, including within the ranks of their own party."
The twins' double act would be oddly missed by those who lampoon it most, however.
"Life just surpasses my capabilities as a satirist," cartoonist Szczepan Sadurski said recently. "Very many of the things that have happened in Poland in recent years could not have been thought up by the best satirists."