On the surface everything looks unsurprising: An unsatisfied Polish population tosses out a government every four years, and the ex-Communist incumbent party earned its exit last Sunday through a series of corruption scandals. Towering unemployment, a sluggish economy, and bickering over what to do with the post-Communist welfare state also played a role in Poland's election, as they did in Germany. Now, the two men whose parties will form a ruling coalition in Warsaw are former colleagues of Lech Walesa and fought through the dark days of Soviet rule.

Good, right? Or at least not bad. But politics in Poland aren't western politics, and what looks ordinary to western eyes may need some interpretation. The two parties that just won power are called the "conservative" Law and Order Party, and the "business-friendly" Civic Platform. The Law and Order Party came out on top. It will put Jaroslaw Kaczynski in as prime minister. Kaczynski's brother, Lech, who once spent time in jail as a Solidarity dissident, is a front-runner (but not a sure winner) in a separate race for president, to be held on October 9.

No major German paper seems pleased with the results. The Kaczynskis look to most editors here like sour next-door neighbors. The left-leaning Tageszeitung calls Sunday's elections "the Polish Catastrophe" and warns that Jaroslaw Kaczinski is an "anti-Semite, a populist, and supporter of the death penalty." Its front-page editorial notes that the Polish parliament has been overwhelmed by parties from the right, and now, "as far as democratic rights and protection of minorities is concerned, it's pervaded by a reactionary mood." In Poland, that means unfriendliness toward Germans, and maybe a call for reparations from World War II.

The left-leaning Berliner Zeitung blames some of this tension on German conservatives. The brothers Kaczynski "wanted to build their party in the '90s on the model of [Germany's] CDU," so Jaroslaw traveled to Berlin for support from Helmut Kohl, Germany's conservative chancellor until 1998. "But [Kohl] brushed off his Polish guest." The Law and Order Party has moved to the right in the meantime and made rhetoric against Germany, and the west, part of its platform - partly a consequence, the paper suggests, of Kohl's snub. (In particular, Law and Order as shown itself to be skeptical of the European Union and much more bent on Polish nationalism.)

Die Welt, a right-leaning paper which can normally be counted on to disagree with Die Tageszeitung, also warns about Law and Order's campaign rhetoric, which has been a strange blend of leftish-sounding welfare promises and xenophobia. Its editorial writer argues: "'Oczyszczenie,' or purging (which can also be translated as 'cleansing') - that was the urge behind most of the Polish votes for Law and Order." Or, since support for Law and Order was on the anemic side (about forty percent) - perhaps "many people just stayed home out of resignation." In any case the election looks to the writer like a reactionary protest against politics-as-usual in Poland.

The deepest analysis of the election comes from the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine, which first points out that Poland "is now a republic with (almost) no left politicians ... The outlines now resemble the political map of the early nineteenth century, before Marxism had infused every layer of political thought: An authoritarian-paternalistic tendency on the one side; a liberal, free-market, individualistic, but also wholly nationalistic trend on the other."

The newspaper notes that the "business-friendly" Civic Platform is a natural ally of Germany's CDU/CSU or Britain's Tory party; whereas the cluster of right-wing parties that flooded into parliament last Sunday are tougher to classify, since they blend left-wing economic rhetoric with "elements of the classical right ... Every one of these parties is oriented around a strong leading personality. The double persona of Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski [at the head of Law and Order] is just an exception that proves the rule."