Gay rights protesters heckle Polish leader

Poland: Polish president Lech Kaczynski is used to eliciting strong reactions wherever he goes and seemed unimpressed when protesters…

Poland: Polish president Lech Kaczynski is used to eliciting strong reactions wherever he goes and seemed unimpressed when protesters burst into a Berlin university hall, calling him a homophobic, anti-democratic leader.

The protest, drawing on Mr Kaczynski's anti-gay policies as mayor of Warsaw, delayed by half-an-hour his delivery of the annual Humboldt University speech on Europe yesterday.

Mr Kaczynski responded by saying he had no plans to persecute homosexuals, but said it was out of the question to talk of "equal rights".

"There is no reason to encourage homosexuality because if they won the upper hand it would mean that mankind would die out."

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His gay rights remarks drew boos from protesters while his speech on his vision of the EU drew polite applause from the rest of the audience - though his views are unlikely to be popular in other European capitals.

Mr Kaczynski says he can envision further EU enlargement - in particular to Ukraine - and welcomes common policies on one-off issues like energy or a European intervention force. But he opposes deeper integration for now, telling a German newspaper that any kind of "superstate" EU would be an "artificial creation".

He told his Berlin audience that the European constitution was premature and should be abandoned and, on the European economy, he expressed doubt that "neo-liberal medicine" with its "very strong side-effects" is the best remedy for Europe's economics ills.

It's that message - a little Tory euroscepticism here, a little social democrat economics there - that secured Mr Kaczynski's presidential election last September and, a month later, the general election victory of Law and Justice (PiS), the political party headed by his twin brother Jaroslaw.

Since taking office, the Kaczynski brothers have launched an unprecedented ideological crusade.

Their first target were the cliques of politicians and business leaders who benefited most from crooked post-Communist privatisation.

The two former child stars have a vision of a strong, sovereign, statist Poland with justice for all, a vision they communicate to huge, non-urban audiences through radical Catholic radio and television stations.

"From a conventional, unsurprising liberal democracy, Poland is moving towards an extraordinary non-liberal democracy," remarked Slawomir Majman of the Warsaw Voice newspaper.