Observations on Poland

In Ukraine the people had an "orange revolution"; next door, the spectre haunting Poland is of a "mohair coalition" backed by serried ranks of "mohair berets".

These are not the usual vanguards of the masses but elderly ladies, as conservative as they are pious, who hang on every word and hymn broadcast by the Catholic-nationalist Radio Maryja. They favour one particular type of headgear.

"Everyone with a mohair beret, put your hands in the air!" Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, the station director, shouted to the crowd in Torun last week as Radio Maryja celebrated its 14th birthday. A host of hands went up. One listener had written an anthem for the occasion: "Put on your mohair beret/And stand by your radio like a guardian angel . . ."

The first to warn of the mohair spectre was Donald Tusk, leader of the Civic Platform party (PO) and surprise loser of Poland's recent presidential election. His party also came second in the parliamentary elections, and then failed to form a grand coalition with Law and Justice (PiS), which won the largest number of seats and whose candidate, Lech Kaczynski, won the presidency.

Tusk highlighted the prospect that the minority PiS government would be sustained by the League of Polish Families (LPR), which is very much as it sounds, and Self-Defence (SO), a less predictable formation. When

Father Rydzyk declared "Long live the mohair coalition!" he was speaking in the presence of two PiS ministers and the LPR and SO leaders.

Mohair berets have also been raised in parliament, where politicians' mothers' choice of headwear has become an issue. "The mohair coalition has beaten the velvet-hat coalition," gloated the SO leader Andrzej Lepper, referring to the style favoured by a leading PO politician. In Gdansk, a PiS councillor has been seen in a dapper black mohair specimen. "We must show solidarity with the mohair berets," his party group leader averred.

"Solidarity" is as potent a term in Polish political rhetoric as "choice" is in ours. Besides revealing Poland's under-recognised potential for adding to the gaiety of nations, the mohair question brings to light all the discontents of transition from communism, largely the same discontents about market orthodoxy that permeated the German election campaign and underpin the debate over the "European social model". The more that PiS emphasised social solidarity, the further it pulled ahead of the neoliberal, pro-business PO.

According to the mohair view of recent Polish history, endlessly repeated in Radio Maryja's broadcasts, the communists and the security services secured their position in 1989 and have since reaped vast profits under the new market order. The SO takes its ideological cue from Pope John Paul II's rejection of the proposition that "after the collapse of communism, the only alternative is capitalism".

But solidarity is defined by exclusion as well as inclusion. Poland's neighbours are aware of that, as are the gay activists whose attempts to march have been blocked in Warsaw by Kaczynski, and by PO mayors in other cities. Meanwhile, Donald Tusk was confronted by an indignant pensioner who upbraided the "young man" (he is 48) for disrespecting his elders. "And what does your mum wear, a satin hat?" she demanded.

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