BERLIN/BRUSSELS: In public, German officials are careful not to take sides when asked about looming parliamentary elections in Poland.Behind the scenes, however, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and many of its partners in Europe are praying the Oct 21 vote will bring an end to the turbulent two-year rule of Warsaw’s erratic Kaczynski brothers.

With less than two weeks to go until the snap poll, the Law and Justice Party (PiS) of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski is running neck-and-neck with the country’s biggest opposition party, the Civic Platform.

In the final stretch, the ruling conservatives have toned down the anti-German, anti-Europe rhetoric that has been their trademark and helped vault them to power in late 2005.

Jaroslaw’s twin brother Lech, Poland’s president, will visit Berlin and lunch with Merkel on Friday — a signal to voters back home that relations are not as strained as leading Polish opposition parties claim.

But diplomats, government officials and analysts in Berlin and Brussels tell a different story.

“No one will say it openly, but naturally many people here are crossing their fingers for a new prime minister with a new majority,” said Stephen Bastos, a Poland expert at the Berlin-based German Council on Foreign Relations.

An official close to Merkel, who has laboured in vain to improve ties with Poland since taking office around the same time as the Kaczynskis, put it more bluntly: “When you work so hard and get nothing in return from the other side, there are consequences.”

RIDICULE: Warsaw’s ties with its European partners have deteriorated since the Kaczynskis took power in 2005 and purged almost everyone in the Polish administration who had any experience of European affairs — career civil servants and ambassadors.

Poland was without an EU ambassador for months and when experienced diplomat Jan Tombinski eventually took over, he sometimes seemed at a loss to explain his country’s shifting positions, diplomats said.

“Poland punches below its weight (in Europe) because it has not yet mastered the game of negotiation, compromise, alliance-building and reciprocity,” one west European EU ambassador said.

Courting their conservative voting base, the Kaczynskis have infuriated partners by speaking out in favour of the death penalty and blocking an EU-wide day against capital punishment.

International Jewish organisations have criticised the government’s links to the radical Catholic Radio Maryja, which has repeatedly broadcast anti-Semitic statements. The station’s elderly listerners are the Kaczynskis’ main backers.

Poland is increasingly subject to ridicule in Brussels. In one incident, the government’s spokeswoman for children demanded a probe into whether handbag-holding Tinky Winky of the Teletubbies television show promoted a “homosexual lifestyle”.

WAR LOSSES: Strains between Poland and its larger western neighbour Germany have been particularly acute, plunging to a new low in June when the Kaczynskis came close to sabotaging Merkel’s bid to seal a deal on a new treaty for the bloc.

Officials say the last straw for Germany came when Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski invoked the number of Poles killed in World War Two to justify demands for greater voting power for his country within the EU.

The German government has made clear that Lech Kaczynski’s visit to Berlin on Friday, which comes on the heels of the Polish president’s trip to Paris earlier in the week, resulted from a Polish request — not a German invitation.

Merkel will do her best to ensure Kaczynski does not score any political points at the meeting which might give his twin brother momentum heading into the election.

But the central topic of their talks -- lingering Polish problems with the new EU treaty -- is a reminder that Germany and its European partners cannot ignore Warsaw, regardless of the outcome of the Polish parliamentary vote.

“I can’t imagine the European reform drive succeeding without Poland,” Eckart von Klaeden, an ally of Merkel and foreign policy expert for her conservatives, told Reuters.—Reuters