Dead man's boots

There is an old phrase that means a position/trade is very hard to advance within because you have to wait for the person above you to leave or die in order to take their place, hence 'dead man's boots'.
Why am I talking of some smelly fellas footwear? Well, being the simple Englishman that I am, I naturally understood that when the Mayor (or President) of Lodz was booted out (excuse the over use of foot related vocabulary, but I couldn't resist) that a new one would be elected. Oh how wrong I was.
It is only due to a passing remark of a colleague that the truth was unveiled to this intrepid little explorer. For the best part of a year, Lodz has been in the hands of a prime-ministerial stand-in. PM Tusk simply appointed some bloke to do the job. Problem was that as an un-elected official he does not/did not hold all the powers of a full president.
The up-shot: money from one department can't be re-assigned to another etc... and Lodz remains in a mess. Only now after 9 months do we have a new PO President-elect. Hanna Zdanowska won the run-offs against SLD Dariusza Jońskiego with a roughly 60/40 split of the votes. That said only only 22.34 percent of the electorate turned out to vote and so 60% is not much, but hey!
Let's see what President Zdanowska is able to do with Lodz's often chaotic administration.

Is politics the new four-letter word?

It seems that politics has droped to such a low within the publics perception that politicians are doing everything to dissasociate themselves with their very bread and butter. At the moment it is election campaign time for the municipal elections in Poland and a recent series of billboards bear a bizzare slogan set of slogans. One for example has the slogan "Nie róbmy polityki. Budujmy bioska" which translates as "We don't do politics. We built football pitches." There are others along similar lines with versions saying : ... we build schools...we build bridges... etc. Well although this is all very well, and ofcourse every country needs a good infrastructure; should it be at the cost of politics?

We don't do politics. We build pitches.

This all sounds very familiar to anyone versed in mid 20th century Polish history. In the 1960's, when it was clear that the system was failing, the Party embarked on a program of building 1000 schools to celebrate 1000 years of Poland. A pure distraction; and my house is a result of this. The school and teachers' house (my house now) were opened in 1964 and closed in 1982 when it was finaly admitted that there was no need for a school in a village of 100 residents :) The question is are PO re-useing slogans from 1960s communist Poland?

You may ask what the problem is. Well, for a government and PM to base their campaign upon the principle of deneying their occupationand role in the country, we can asssume that their is a gigantic rift between the rulers and the ruled, so to speak. Only when politicians are able to stand tall and be proud will real politics start. In recent elections the turn-out has been very low ( 53,8% in 2007, an increase of 13,2% from 2005 ) and people have disengaged drom Warsaw. As I said before, roads and infrastructure are obviously important, yet peoples lives consist of more than just this and it is the politicians' jobs to nogotiate a path beween these complex issues. For example issues that need to be dealt with include pension and retirement laws (still based on a communist system) as well as health and medical insurance (ditto).

It is ofcourse easy to poke fun at an advert, and ofcourse that is all it is at the end of the day: an advert. It is not indivative per se of the political climate and attitudes in Warsaw. However, looking at the bigger picture, i would hazard a guess to say that it is somewhat close to the real picture.