ON THE 10th of every month Polish nationalists gather outside the presidential palace in Warsaw with flowers and votive candles to mourn Lech Kaczynski, its former occupant, who died with 95 others in a plane crash in Russia in 2010. They also demand justice. A pensioner in a billowing raincoat has no doubts about who caused the crash: “Vladimir Putin, and Donald Tusk”—then Poland’s prime minister.
That the outgoing centrist goverment conspired to murder a right-wing president is a minority belief, but one felt deeply on the far right. But at its latest rally the crowd felt justice was inching closer. The Law and Justice party (PiS) led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski (Lech’s twin), which won last month’s parliamentary election, has named Antoni Macierewicz, a leading proponent of conspiracy theories about the crash, as minister of defence.
In its first term in power from 2005-07, PiS split the country over religious and cultural issues and picked needless fights with Germany and the European Union. For some Poles, the new government confirms that PiS has not changed. “It’s like going back a decade,” says a well-dressed man at a nearby…