World View:Jaroslaw Kaczynski's departure as prime minister of Poland is a reminder to politicians everywhere: it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it, writes Derek Scally
Analysis of last week's election shows that Polish voters, particularly first-timers and the under-30s who stayed in bed last time around, voted Kaczynski out of office more because of his abrasive style than his substance.
So European leaders would be wrong to assume it will be plain sailing with the new Civic Platform (PO) government and its leader, Donald Tusk. Wearing his trademark boyish smile, Tusk promised this week to consign to the diplomatic dustbin the raw tone of the Kaczynski era.
For Kaczynski, however, that tone was just the means to an end: to boost Poland's profile and influence in the European Union.
He rewrote the script on Polish-EU relations, pushing Poland's national interest like never before and, like it or not, this is the script Tusk is obliged to follow.
Kaczysnki has a political knack of identifying a bone of contention and gnawing away at it. He won the 2005 election with a promise to tackle endemic corruption and address widespread unhappiness at the carve-up of Poland's post-communist spoils.
Though he lost last Sunday's election, he still won a third of the vote and more support than ever before. Many of those who voted him out, though pleased that the government was addressing corruption, disagreed with his idea of a "war on corruption" fought in shrill, accusatory tones with police raids staged for television.
Another reason Polish voters ousted Kaczynski was their embarrassment at how he drew attention to Polish concerns on the EU stage.
Not that they view the concerns he raised as unfounded, mind you, nor the attention itself as a bad thing.
Taking his lead from Britain and France, Kaczynski adopted a go-for-broke national interest approach to the EU.
His assumption that there is no real difference between good and bad attention in the EU is debatable.
But few in Brussels would argue that, in just 15 months, Kaczynski was incredibly successful at putting Poland in the spotlight.
That it was a largely negative light didn't seem to bother many Polish MEPs, for whom the label "difficult" is as much of a badge of honour as it is for their Tory colleagues.
Even before Kaczynski, Polish officials argued that they learned to be "difficult" only to counter what they viewed as a patronising attitude of the older EU member states towards Poland and its concerns.
A case in point is the Russian ban on Polish food exports beginning in September 2005, the loss of a crucial market worth at least €400 million annually to Polish farmers.
For months, EU officials stonewalled Polish attempts to raise the matter and only agreed to act when Warsaw blocked the start of EU-Russia negotiations on a new strategic partnership agreement.
Poland earned a black mark against its name in Brussels but the Poles wondered whether French farmers and French officials would have been treated in the same way.
That feeling of being patronised permeates all levels of Polish dealings with the EU. They resent being told they are obsessed with their history by EU officials who are completely ignorant of that history, one that has played a key role in European life for centuries and without which it is impossible to understand Poland in the first place.
Irish diplomats with Polish sympathies accept this problem in the EU but suggest that it partly due to Warsaw's ignorance of EU history.
"Poland has to accept that it has arrived at the EU dinner party halfway through," said one senior official this week. "So many things have already been discussed and dismissed and won't be raised again, so there's no point in Poland bringing them up."
The square-root voting model is one example, waved around by Polish officials in recent months although already dismissed by longer-standing EU members as old hat.
Behind these slips lie the inexperience of Polish officials arising from the fact that no government since 1989 has managed to create a fully functioning state apparatus.
Instead, each change of administration brought with it a turnover of at least 50,000 officials and civil servants.
The Kaczynski government went even further, firing the country's most experienced EU officials and ambassadors and abolishing the entire civil service, replacing it with a pool of workers dependent on government ministries for employment.
Tusk has made civil service reform a priority, so EU partners can look forward to greater continuity with Poland in the future than in the past.
But the EU can be assured of continuity, too, in Poland's vigorous pursuit of its national interests in Brussels, even if it is couched in language that is more conciliatory that confrontational.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski will keep Poland punching at what he considers its appropriate weight through his twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski, who retains a leading foreign policy role under the Polish constitution.
And Tusk needs no reminding that the conservative wing of his own Civic Platform approved of Kaczynski's approach to the EU.
And as EU eyes watch coalition talks in Warsaw, it's worth remembering that it was not Jaroslaw Kaczynski that devised the most notorious EU slogan of recent years but the Civic Platform: "Nice or Death."