Europe's most famous twins turn 58

Jun 18, 2007, 10:47 GMT

Warsaw - They made history last year when Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski became the first identical twins in modern history to simultaneously take the office of president and prime minister in their native Poland. On Monday they celebrated their 58th birthday.

They first entered the national limelight at the age of 13 when as freckled-faced blond brats they starred in the children's film About Those Two Who Stole The Moon, chronicling the misadventures of two extremely naughty boys.

Nick-named the 'Kaczory,' the ducks, the portly veteran right-wing politicians are famous for their combative and feisty, sometimes aggressive, political style.

They have also come under fire from both the Polish media and their political opposition for practising an unyielding us-against- them 'twinocratic' brand of politics.

Born 45 minutes after Jaroslaw, President Lech Kaczynski is the younger of the twins and can be distinguished from his elder brother by a black mole on the right side of his nose.

Both twins hold doctorates in law, were active dissidents in the anti-communist Solidarity trade union and took up political careers after the 1989 collapse of communism in Poland.

Jaroslaw the elder is regarded as the political mastermind behind the unexpected September 2005 victory in parliamentary elections of his right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party and the surprise presidential win of brother Lech a month later.

President Lech Kaczynski is set to hold office until Poland's next presidential election in the autumn of 2010, while a parliamentary election, in which Jaroslaw Kaczynski will likely run, comes a year earlier in 2009.

On Monday, the twins appeared to be keeping their EU partners guessing as to which one of them will show up in Brussels this Thursday and Friday for a historic summit focused on hammering out a deal to push forward work on the EU's future blanket constitution.

Both Kaczynskis have firmly said no to the so-called 'double majority' system of voting enshrined in the existing draft constitution, thus threatening to veto the summit and further progress on the constitutional project regarded as a necessary reform ahead of the EU's further eastward expansion.

The Poles contend the double majority system is unfair, giving disproportionate power to larger countries such as Germany or France.

The brothers are pushing for the 'square root' voting system which calculates each country's number of votes based on the square root of its population, thus they insist, insuring a more equitable and fair distribution of votes among the EU's 27 member states.