POLAND: Polish voters will soon be seeing double after the country's conservative leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski decided to become prime minister yesterday, joining in office his identical twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski.
The shock news followed the resignation of the popular prime minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz yesterday evening after just 10 months in the job.
Mr Marcinkiewicz, a headmaster turned politician, denied he was a stop-gap candidate when he was nominated for prime minister after the Kaczynski brothers' Law and Justice Party (PiS) won last September's general election.
At the time, Jaroslaw Kaczynski had planned on becoming prime minister but then decided to stand aside. With his brother Lech running in the presidential elections a month later, political observers suggested the decision was designed to appease voters not enamoured of the idea of being ruled by identical twins.
But even without an official government office, Jaroslaw Kaczynski proved to be an important power broker in Warsaw and appears to be linked to yesterday's developments.
Mr Marcinkiewicz's resignation appears to arise from a meeting he had on Thursday evening with the leader of the opposition liberal Civic Platform (PO), Donald Tusk, of which PiS leaders knew nothing.
Mr Tusk said yesterday that Mr Marcinkiewicz had complained during the meeting about the complicated situation within the PiS, something the departing prime minister denied yesterday.
He is the third leading government figure to resign in recent months after finance minister Zyta Gilowska and the foreign minister Stefan Meller, who resigned after PiS formed a coalition with two populist parties.
The Kaczynski twins were born in the ruins of Warsaw in 1949 - Jaroslaw 45 minutes before Lech - and become household names as child actors in the Polish film classic About the Two Who Stole the Moon.
They learned from an early age to help each other out and in school Jaroslaw sat science exams for his brother while Lech took language exams pretending to be Jaroslaw.
Both joined the emerging anti-communist movement in the 1970s and acted as advisers to Solidarity trade union leader Lech Walesa, but fell out when he became president in 1990. They launched their own party a decade later, Law and Justice winning last year's general election.
Since taking office, the right-wing PiS has begun inquiries of questionable privatisation decisions in the post-communist years, of collaboration between public figures and the communist authorities and into the relationship between business and the media.
The brothers talk half a dozen times a day on the phone and their well-worn phrase, "My brother and I think . . ." has become a cult expression in Poland.
But their new political double act will mean that Jaroslaw and Lech will have to abandon their habit of rarely appearing together in public.