Your Own Bank Account at 59
There’s a quite curious article available right now on the website of Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. Perhaps I’ll just give you the lede:
Finally independent from Mama: Poland’s former head of government Jarosław Kaczyński can undertake his own money-matters from now on – he has opened his first account in his own name.
That’s right, for many years previously – ever since he had money of his own that he needed to bank, one presumes – he has used his mother’s account. He continues to live with her, at age 59, and has never married – which almost goes without saying, for you don’t live with mother when you have a wife, even in Poland, when you are currently the chairman of one of the country’s main political parties and previously served not only as prime minister but as chief-of-staff to Lech Wałęsa when he was Poland’s first democratically-elected president.
(By the way, Kaczyński also has a law degree, was a prominent activist in the Solidarity trade union in the 1980s, and boasts an identical-twin brother, Lech, who is Poland’s current president. Oh, and Lech and Jarosław were child-actors way back in the day, starring in a Polish fairy-tale film in 1962.)
It’s not my intention here at all to make fun of the esteemed chairman of Poland’s Law and Justice Party, even if the political formation he founded with his brother back in 2001 is rather too conservative and anti-German for my tastes. Indeed, perhaps it’s that latter tendency that suggests why the Süddeutsche Zeitung is raising this matter now in its cyber-pages, with no more ostensible motive than a new report on this matter of the new bank account from the Polish newspaper Super Express, which the Süddeutsche Zeitung itself in the article delicately describes as a “boulevard newspaper” – i.e. as a racy tabloid (which it is: check out its website for yourself) and therefore presumably several layers of quality below that of itself. More specifically, the Kaczyński brothers have now waded into what is becoming an increasingly ugly German-Polish dispute about the (German) League of Expellees and its head, Erika Steinbach. I’m not going to get into the details of that now; those are anyway essentially the same as they were back when this weblog covered the subject more than five years ago. The Süddeutsche Zeitung will bring you up to date on that dispute here, but you’ll either have to bring your own German or resort to Babelfish or Google Translator or somesuch.
No, it’s late as I write this post, so we’re going to stick with the light and fluffy, like the first thing Kaczyński did with his new bank account, which it seems Super Express managed to find out as well. First of all, it’s an Internet banking account (no mention of which Polish bank), and he used it to buy two books, including a biography of Obama, and a CD of Polish music. His comment to the Polish tabloid: “The account functions very efficiently, flawlessly.”
Here’s another angle the Süddeutsche Zeitung mentions: having done poorly in the October, 2007, parliamentary elections (so that Jarosław Kaczyński had to vacate the prime minister’s office), the Law and Justice Party is apparently trying to rehabilitate its image as a modern and hip party; some PR consultant probably noticed Jarosław still using his mother’s account and made a discreet suggestion. That would also explain this article (its title: “Jarosław Kaczyński: I’m a completely new man”) that represents all that I could find about this guy from the recent respectable Polish press. Nothing in there about his bank account or living arrangements, though; instead you have Kaczyński engaging in some sharp, even hostile repartee with a pair of young and sophisticated and female reporters for Gaztea Wyborcza that too often reads like a heated exchange between Grandpa Simpson and Lisa.
