Making politics meaningful again?

'One round or several rounds?' Gazeta Wyborcza ponders the question ahead of Poland’s presidential elections this Sunday. According to latest polls cited by the Warsaw daily, Bronisław Komorowski, candidate of the ruling liberal Civic Platform (PO), enjoys 51-percent support among those polled, whilst his main rival, Jarosław Kaczyński of the opposition conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS), has 33 percent of support. If these figures prove accurate when the ballots have been counted on Sunday night, the second round, planned for 4 July, would prove unnecessary and Poles could "forget about politics and go on holidays," writes Wyborcza. The daily stresses that the campaign, which ends today, has been unique because it has taken place in the shadow of disastrous floods and the Smolensk plane crash in which the former president, Lech Kaczyński, lost his life. It is perhaps for this reason, notes the conservative Rzeczpospolita daily, that "for the first time in years, the political rivals signalled a desire for consensus on the key issues." The candidates avoided heated exchanges and the few debates carried out were rather bland. The paper surmises that this is due to a real desire for "political life in Poland to change for the better." There is no certainty, however, that the main contestants’ unprecedented ‘meekness’ has not been meremy a publicity gimmick. Rzeczpospolita hopes instead that it is more than that and that after the elections politicians "don’t return to the pointless warring we know from recent years" and "make politics meaningful again."