Janusz Palikot, left, founder of the Palikot Movement, Sunday in Warsaw. His party won 10 percent in Poland's parliamentary election.
By NICHOLAS KULISH
Published: October 10, 2011
WARSAW — Waving a gun and a sex toy at a news conference may have branded Janusz Palikot as an extreme politician, but the ensuing notoriety had its benefits. Just a few years later, one out of 10 Polish voters cast a ballot for the socially libertarian-style party that bears the provocateur's name.
The parliamentary election on Sunday revealed the depth of change that Polish society has undergone over the past generation. Long pigeonholed as deeply conservative and devoutly Roman Catholic, many Poles have drifted away from the church and seek a secular state more in step with Western Europe.
No party better encapsulates those changes than the new Palikot Movement. Its founder, a philosophy student turned entrepreneur turned politician, has upended conventional wisdom and ignored a tradition of tiptoeing around the church. He has campaigned to create civil unions for gay men and lesbians, to legalize abortion and even to end religious education in state schools.
When results are final, the first transsexual member is expected to enter Parliament from his party.
Not only did Mr. Palikot's party win 10 percent of the vote, but the centrist party he left behind, the staid and stuffy but Europe-friendly Civic Platform of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, also won a resounding victory over the nationalist-conservative Law and Justice Party of former Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
The sensation of the night, however, was Mr. Palikot and the loose alliance that gathered under the umbrella of his famous — or infamous — name. "There is a growing culture of change in Poland thanks to the fact that millions of Poles work in the European Union," and that thousands more study abroad in European countries, Mr. Palikot said.
Political analysts interpreted the parliamentary vote Sunday as a signal that Poland would continue down the road of openness rather than slipping back into the insularity and conservatism of the past, a development that Mr. Palikot said he welcomed.
"This clear mandate that Tusk got yesterday, the clear defeat of Law and Justice and the result of our own party is a clear sign that Tusk has a mandate from society for a more open relationship with Germany and Russia," said Mr. Palikot, who as a philosophy student wrote his master's thesis on Immanuel Kant.
The Palikot Movement is nothing like the Pirate Party, which lately made a strong showing in Berlin, and it is far removed from the kind of antigovernment protests sweeping the world and occupying Wall Street. The election-night rally was filled with businessmen in suits, political consultants and other members of the Warsaw establishment. Mr. Palikot said he would defend business owners in Parliament against bureaucracy and regulation.
"He is exactly the right man at exactly the right time," said Piotr Tymochowicz, a political consultant specializing in communication who previously worked with the late populist politician Andrzej Lepper, and now works with Mr. Palikot. "Their aims are not the same," he said of the two men, "but they both wanted to destroy the cemented political scene."
Even as a young man, Mr. Palikot, 46, had a flair for the controversial. As a teenager he was arrested for using his high school's public-address system to call for a strike after martial law was imposed in an effort to quell the Solidarity movement.
He went on to study philosophy, before joining in the rapid liberalization of the Polish economy as it transitioned from Communism by starting a company that collected and resold wooden crates. He branched out into the liquor industry, his entrepreneurial endeavors eventually making him a millionaire, before deciding to go into politics.
"My philosophical education gave me the idea that at the end of the day, a person has to think about more than himself," Mr. Palikot said of his motives for becoming a politician.
For all Mr. Palikot has done, he is forever associated with the fateful day in April 2007, when he held a news conference to draw attention to accusations of sexual abuse and even rape against police officers in the city of Lublin, and underscored his point with his provocative choice of props.
"I think it has impeded my campaign, this pistol and vibrator," Mr. Palikot said Monday, in a small, undecorated room at the Polish Press Agency building, more than a dozen cameramen and reporters waiting outside for him. "It gave me publicity, but on the other hand, of course, it was a very huge burden. I've been misunderstood, and my political rivals used it against me."
It was not only his political rivals, but also his eventual political allies who had to think twice about him.
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