Since the time many years ago that the Kennedy-Nixon television debate was won by the former, because he looked better and had a smoother shave, it is common knowledge that what matter less is what politicians say and more where and against what background he appears. Polish politicians also know this. It is enough to compare pictures from the start of Andrzej Lepper’s political career and his most recent snapshots to notice that the leader of Samoobrona knows how valuable the right image can be. A few years ago we were looking at a peasant in a wool coat with ruddy cheeks. Now staring out from the photographs and television screen is a “creature of influence” in a clean cut suit with an ideal hairstyle whose compromising flush is hidden under a tasteful tan. A man with such a look is impossible to treat like a country bumpkin – this is a real politician (at least according to Andrzej Lepper himself and the Kaczynski brothers). So, thanks to the intervention of a good image specialist we can civilize the primitive man so much that he’s fallen off of the wagon onto the backseat of a government limousine, which transports him straight to the Palace of the Council of Ministers to the seat of the deputy prime minister.

Less subtle were the steps taken to create Prime Minister Marcinkiewicz’s image. Let’s consider one example: the press conference concerning coalition talks with PO, which took place not in the building of the Council of Ministers, but in Lazienki Park: a beautiful sunny day, the golden Polish fall, the Chopin monument in the background. Against all of this, what the prime minister says really has little meaning. The main role in this spectacle is played by stage design, to which the head of the government is expected to conform by devoting most of his time to his love for the music of Chopin (including the use of a Chopin polonaise as a ringer on his telephone). The significance of this show is clear – at last we have a prime minister who is ours, Polish and yet so natural, a person who doesn’t want to cut themselves off from society, represented in this case by journalists across the barrier of the conference table.

This impression was supposed to be reinforced by material broadcast on TV a few days later showing the prime minister in his working apartment. Empty rooms and no traces of personal items are intended to suggest that the occupant does not spend much time there. Why? There are two reasons, the material suggested not so subtly – the prime minister works all day and is unwilling to return to the apartment because it lacks the warmth of home and family. What a difference in relation to previous governments who only took care of their party’s interests and put nepotism above the common good. Aside from this, such a prime minister is touchingly inept – one minute he talks about his wife’s claim that he is able to screw up any joke and the next he is caught in a metaphor about the Earth’s gravity on the Earth and lunar gravity on the moon. And he talks in a way that everyone understands – one moment he calls his political opponents weaklings and the next he is screaming “Yes! Yes! Yes!”.

Instantly, the climate has become so comfortable and the government is putting its best face forward to the nation.