Volume On High

Poland’s Roman Catholic station Radio Maryja (pronounced Maria) has always blended the sacred world of faith with the profane arena of politics. Its archconservative commentators love to slag off the “evils” of the free market and the perils of joining Europe. But this month they acquired an opponent tough for them to dismiss. After one pundit declared that Jewish groups were “humiliating Poland internationally by demanding money” for property expropriated during World War II and likened their efforts to a “holocaust industry,” the Vatican itself decided this was the last straw. It instructed the Polish Catholic church to prevent its station from mixing prayer and politics.

The trouble for Poland is that Radio Maryja’s excesses are a disturbing straw in the wind. The country’s new government is using the broadcaster as its outlet of choice in a campaign to “purify” Poland, an effort that has included attacks on critical journalists, on an “alcoholic” civil service, on the former communist “establishment” and on the central bank. This fragrant brew of right-wing populist causes is likely to become more pungent this week, when talks to form a coalition government could result in an important post — Deputy Prime Minister — for Andrzej Lepper. Leader of the Self-Defense party, Lepper is a radical populist who has been convicted of assault (the conviction was erased when he entered parliament) and is under investigation for allegedly libelous attacks on his opponents. He made his name in violent street demonstrations in the mid-1990s and has blasted free-market reforms and E.U. membership for Poland. Only this month he was criticized for declaring that he had wanted to slap a television journalist during an interview. Even so, an official from the ruling center-right Law and Justice party (pis) said it had “no alternative” but to invite Lepper into government because it could not find another partner to form a majority. The country’s new leadership, as a result, could be as welcome in the rest of Europe as the proverbial Polish plumber. “Poland’s image has been damaged,” Leszek Balcerowicz, governor of the central bank and architect of Poland’s postcommunist reforms, told Time last week. “The governing party’s strategy is to win votes by demonizing the transformation [to free markets].”

So far that strategy has worked just fine for the pis, which was elected last September (with 156 out of 460 seats in the Sejm) and is led by identical twin brothers Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski. They promise to get tough on corruption, crime and ex-communists, and build a “strong state” that promotes Polish national interests; Jaroslaw is party leader and Lech President. The hung parliament has hampered policymaking, but the brothers’ combativeness has kept the political pot boiling. They’ve picked their biggest fight with Balcerowicz, the polarizing symbol of post-communist economic reforms that have resulted in 40% growth in gdp since 1989 — but also 18% unemployment. Widely respected abroad, Balcerowicz has stood up for the independence of the central bank and also for Europe-wide merger rules. So when he opposed what he saw as an attempt by the ruling party to block a planned merger of Polish branches of the Italian banking giant UniCredit earlier this year, he was excoriated. President Kaczynski said he would not renew Balcerowicz’s appointment. Lepper called for his removal. Last month, the parliament established a commission to probe the bank’s role in 17 years of privatization. “It’s a sort of harassment, a brutal infringement on the political independence” of the bank, Balcerowicz says.

But that isn’t all: the government has mounted a legal challenge against the European Commission for approving the UniCredit merger, prompting the Commission to file a counterclaim of its own. “That’s a very symbolic gesture, and a bad signal,” says Aurore Wanlin, a fellow at the Center for European Reform in London. “It’s much better to simply talk through the problem. The government has a lot to learn.” According to critics, the suit shows how out of step the government has become with the rest of Europe and its own pro-Western urban élite. But it appears to revel in contrariness. “It’s incredible how many conflicts they have produced in such a short time,” said Jan Rokita, leader of the opposition Civic Platform party.

The government has courted further controversy by setting up an “anticorruption” police force, controlled by the ruling party, with sweeping powers to probe serving officials and even private citizens. It re-opened an investigation into former (and still popular) President Aleksander Kwasniewski. Meanwhile, Poland’s conservative press has declared a small culture war on “liberal” groups including gays, artists and feminists. Example: Kazimiera Szczuka, 39, a literary-talk-show host and prominent feminist, recently made gentle fun of a girl who leads prayers on Radio Maryja by imitating her reedy, childlike voice on a satirical TV show. The girl is disabled, though Szczuka was unaware of this fact. A column in the radio station’s sister newspaper called her a “representative of the civilization of death.” The government’s media oversight board slapped an unprecedented $154,000 fine on the TV station for “mocking the disabled and their prayers” (though it has imposed no fine on Radio Maryja for its anti-Semitic outbursts). Szczuka’s face was splashed across the right-wing press. “It was horrible, a crazy attack,” she said last week. “It reminds me of socialism of the 1970s and ’80s.”

These controversies do not appear to have lost pis its core support in rural Poland. There, unemployment and poverty levels are higher than in the cities, and many are ready to blame free-market reforms for their woes. Though the Kaczynskis’ personal approval ratings have fallen, new elections today would provide the same result as six months ago, pollsters say. But neither has the government gained support; Poles still largely support the E.U., for example. “There is no groundswell of dissatisfaction,” argues Balcerowicz. “What is happening now comes from the top down.”

In an interview with Time last week, hours before agreeing on a governing program with the pis, Lepper took pains to sound statesmanlike: “We want to reassure Western capital. Our party wants Western capital in Poland. But we want it on equal conditions with Polish enterprises.” He said he did not propose “grabbing the reserves of the central bank” or “destroying the E.U. accession treaty,” but only wanted the bank to share “co-responsibility” with the government for the economy, so that it “should be awakened to make money to cover the social sphere.” Growing animated, he added: “We are not announcing some kind of revolution.”

Ironically, the reforms Lepper and the Kaczynskis denounced on their way to power have made the economy so resilient that their fulminations have not managed to shake investor confidence. Political shocks such as questioning the central bank’s independence or promising new programs without new revenues are being largely absorbed. “The fundamentals are strong,” says Balcerowicz. But if the government continues on its present course, for how long?