Czestochowa, Poland. A glorious Sunday morning in July. About 200,000 Poles of all ages are gathered 150 miles south of Warsaw at the shrine of the Black Madonna, Queen of Poland. It’s a sight to stir a pilgrim’s heart, evoking memories of the mass meetings that led to the fall of communism 20 years ago. Candles, incense, holy banners, a galaxy of robed priests and nuns, soulful hymn-singing – it’s like the old glory days when John Paul II would fly into his native land, kiss the tarmac and beseech the faithful: “Be not afraid!”

But the presiding personality today is not the late charismatic Pope, but Poland’s prime minister, a corpulent little bloke called Jaroslaw Kaczynski, whose identical twin brother, Lech, happens to be the country’s president and co-equal in political power. Beside him is his supposed favourite priest and media ally, Father Taduesz Rydzyk – a waxy-faced, tinted-haired Catholic media mogul. Father Rydzyk’s empire includes satellite and cable channels, sundry newspapers and Radio Maryja, which broadcasts to millions on the only waveband (89.1 MHz) that can be heard in Poland’s road tunnels. It was Father Rydzyk’s radio station, with its loyal audience of fundamentalist Catholics, that brought the Kaczynski twins’ Law and Justice party to power in 2005. The platform was anti-secular, anti-contraception, anti-homosexual, anti-prostitution, anti-Germany, anti-Russia and above all anti-former communists. Its unspoken message was “Be very afraid!” Radio Maryja, according to its critics, also plays host to antisemitic phone-ins, while disclaiming any responsibility for their sentiments.

As Mass ends, the prime minister, who has been kneeling devoutly, rises to receive the kiss of peace from Father Rydzyk. Stepping to the microphone on the high altar he announces to delirious applause: “Here… is… Poland!” Poland, he means to say, is not to be found amid Warsaw’s soulless Soviet-era concrete blocks, its shiny skyscrapers with multinational company logos, or its proliferating casinos and nightclubs. Poland, he is saying, is a country of the soul, a collective state of mind that survived the annexations and liquidations of the 19th and 20th centuries. Poland is a nationhood of Catholic values protected by the icon of the Black Madonna, an effigy that carries on her cheek a savage wound inflicted by a foreign invader 400 years ago. Stirring stuff.

But the true location of Kaczynski’s Poland would be more scandalously apparent the next day. Come Monday, a transcription of a taped speech, allegedly delivered by the same Father Rydzyk, was published in the popular Polish magazine Vprost. The priest had told a group of journalism students (a sneak had his tape recorder running) that the Polish president’s wife was pro-choice on abortion when it came to rape victims. “You witch, I’ll let you have it,” Father Rydzyk barked on the tape at his absent antagonist, the prime minister’s sister-in-law. “If you want to kill people, you should be put down yourself first!” To cap it all, the priest is alleged to have described President Kaczynski, the prime minister’s inseparable twin brother, as a “crook” who crawls subserviently to Poland’s surviving 10,000 Jews (2.7m Polish Jews were murdered in Nazi death camps). Lech’s betrayal of the cause, in Father Rydzyk’s reported view, was to call for the building of a memorial to a group of Jews killed during the war – not by Nazis but by Poles. “You know that it’s about giving $65 billion to the Jews,” the turbulent priest reportedly snarled. “They will come to you and say, ‘Give me your coat. Take off your trousers. Give me your shoes.’ ” The Kaczynskis might well have concluded: “With friends like Father Rydzyk, who needs enemies?”

The ensuing storm, involving international Jewish anti-defamation groups, an appalled Vatican, and Poland’s shocked neighbours, from Lithuania to Germany, reveals not only the xenophobic, anti-semitic and ultra-Catholic culture flourishing in Poland, but a government plagued by eccentricity, chaos and mutual loathing. As calls went out for Father Rydzyk’s denunciation and arrest, Jaroslaw fired one of his two deputy prime ministers, Andrzej Lepper, leader of the Self-Defence minority coalition party. A political crisis ensued that is unlikely to be resolved until new parliamentary elections, probably before the end of the year. Yet, whatever the result, President Lech is set to remain in power until 2009. Jaroslaw’s stated reason for firing Lepper was his alleged involvement in land-deal bribes. Few commentators doubted that the prime minister was attempting to divert attention from the antics of Father Rydzyk, on whom the twin brothers are dependent for popular support. Thus passed a typical recent week in Polish politics.

Pint-sized, rotund, with anachronistic choirboy haircuts, the monozygotic Kaczynskis (“Cash-inskis”) – President Lech and Prime Minister Jaroslaw – dream of bringing Poland to “rightful” prominence on the world stage.

First they aim to rid the nation of corruption by purging Poland’s enemy within – every communist collaborator, however minor or reluctant (a task, in their view, left undone after the Soviet collapse in 1991). Then they intend to raise a beacon of Catholic Polish nationalism to shine out across a continent sunk in materialism, pornography, homosexuality and godlessness – their frank estimation of the European Union that welcomed them in 2004.

And there are other fatter, more dangerous fish to fry. The twins see Poland as the only credible bastion against the re-emergence of the ancient “Prussian-Russian threat”. Bloated with gas and oil reserves, Russia is running its pipelines under the Baltic, bypassing Poland, straight into Germany, a move the Kaczynskis view as a repetition of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, which preceded the carve-up of their country. To combat the new Russo-Teutonic alliance, the twins have been earnestly lobbying George W Bush to plant anti-missile missiles on Poland’s southern frontier. George W, it seems, is happy to oblige. So Putin has torn up his arms-limitation agreement with Nato (to which Poland belongs) and is threatening to aim his nuclear warheads westwards again, reviving fears of a new cold war. The Polish leaders see themselves as saviours of western civilisation, akin to King Jan III Sobieski, who stood up to massed Islamic Turks at the Gates of Vienna in the 17th century, or the legendary Polish general Joseph Pilsudski, who duffed up Red Army hordes at Kiev in 1920. While George W Bush courts Poland’s twins, Russia is stoking its own anti-Polish grievances. Putin’s Russia, flush with energy revenues, is beginning to see itself once more as a player in the world, thwarted by a puny neighbour that is attempting to spoil its links with Germany and France by playing dangerous missile games with America.

Back in Warsaw, I am relishing the baffling, queasy ironies of Poland under the twins. In the shadow of one of the ugliest buildings on the planet, Warsaw’s Stalinesque concrete Palace of Culture, I am asking a Polish mother and daughter why hasn’t it been pulled down yet?

“I’d blow it up tomorrow,” says the mother. “It’s the dark night of communism.” “Oh, no,” protests her 24-year-old daughter. “It’s the only authentic building in Warsaw. We must never touch it.” The lass has a point. Even the medieval-style houses in the old town are copied from paintings by Canaletto. The originals, like the rest of Warsaw, were razed by Hitler after the city’s uprising in 1944.

In an age of globalisation, membership of the EU, and the rule of the Kaczynski twins, the search for authentic Poland – “Here… is… Poland!” – is a trip through a Warhol wonderland of striking contradictions and hollow imitations. Mass-produced holy statues and pictures of Jesus compete with window displays of naughty knickers and sexy garters. Top hotels in this country of finger-wagging morality offer endless Polish soaps alongside the hottest “adult” movies on the continent. Poland has long been a transit market for the sex-slave industry, and it stands at No 7 in a worldwide survey of kiddie porn, six places above the UK. Restaurants, featuring every conceivable boil-in-the-bag replica of ethnic cuisine, include a retro-commie canteen where your taste buds can feast nostalgically on Soviet-Polack delicacies such as szmalec (fried lard on “home-made” bread with a hint of sawdust). I take my early black coffee and Plackl potato pancake fix at the Radio Free Europe Cafe, where cold-war memorabilia festoon the walls. In the city of Krakow, five hours’ south of Warsaw and an hour’s drive from Auschwitz, where today barely 100 resident Jews can be found, there’s a summer Jewish nostalgia fest. Vendors flog miniature brass menorahs and plates of pierogies to the plaintive strains of a klezmer band. In the evenings thousands of Polish goy youths try out Yiddish folk dances, as if blithely ignorant of the ghosts of Krakow’s Hebrew dead. Yet anti-semitism is alive and well in Poland, especially in the football stadiums, where fans customarily taunt their rivals with the worst epithet in their pithy vocabulary: “Jew-boys!” Black people are seldom in evidence on Poland’s streets. When they appear as visitors on football pitches, they are pelted with bananas by swastika-tattooed honking skinheads.

The appalling potholed roads of Poland are crammed with top-of-the-range 4x4 Porsches, Lexuses and BMWs, but out along Warsaw’s fashionable Belvedere avenue, where Jaroslaw has his chancellery office, I speak to uniformed nurses who have been demonstrating for two months for a living wage. Their “city of white tents” is cordoned off by police and soldiers; a metal barrier screens the prime minister from the untidy sight they make. Most of the protesters are kindly, middle-aged women whose full-time average pay is the equivalent of £150 a month. Yet house prices, fuelled by the availability of 120% mortgages at 4% spread over 45 years, have doubled in two years: a typical two-bedroom apartment costs £150,000 and prices are still rising. Properties are snapped up by outsiders, including the wealthier element of the UK’s estimated 700,000-strong Polish plumber-bricklayer-barmaid diaspora. For the stay-at-homes, unemployment is 14% (40% for the under-twenties), though it is hoped that the EU, and trade with Germany, will make things better. The economy, despite widespread poverty and joblessness, is set to expand by 7% this year.

Jaroslaw, who boasts that his only knowledge of Germany is “the gents at Frankfurt airport transit precinct”, has no time for Germany or the Germans. The compliment is returned. The Germans call the brothers “the Polish potatoes”, in tribute to their bland, chubby cheeks and challenged brains – a soubriquet that prompted the indignant duo to carpet the German ambassador. Throwing tantrums worthy of Basil Fawlty, Jaroslaw attempted in Brussels in June to wreck the EU voting agreement, weighted in favour of the largest national populations. Before an aghast European parliament he taunted Germany’s homespun Chancellor Merkel with her country’s Nazi past. The population of Poland, declared Jaroslaw, should be regarded as 66m, rather than 39m, because of all the Poles slaughtered by her German predecessors.

Tony Blair, in his final appearance on the Brussels stage at the end of June, can take credit for keeping Poland within the club (Merkel had proposed going ahead with a revised treaty without Poland). Blair had had many a private talk with Lech Kaczynski over the past year, assuring him that Britain and Poland shared a common vision. In April he told him: “We both want a Europe that is effective, that is practical, but a Europe that is one of sovereign and independent states collaborating and working together.” But on a visit to Britain last year, Lech whinged about the migrant workers to Britain who, while away, continue to collect the dole in Poland. The allegation turns out to be wildly untrue. Anyway, Blair turned a deaf ear.

At home the twins have been searching for reds under the beds in a commie witch-hunt known quaintly as “the lustration” (a semantic mix of “cleansing” and “shedding light”), to out all who might have aided Poland’s communist regime – which pretty well includes anybody they don’t like, including good old Lech Walesa, the hero of Solidarity, still resident in Gdansk. The most stunning instance is the Kaczynskis’ attempt to unseat the Euro MP Bronislaw Geremek. A prominent member of Solidarity and a political prisoner under the communists, as foreign minister, Geremek had taken Poland into Nato in 1999. He has refused to declare that he had not been of assistance to the communist secret police, believing such enforced declarations to be an insult to human dignity. As the lustration law stands, any who refuse to sign the document of non-collaboration can be banned from practising a profession or from holding public office for a decade. Geremek has refused to stand down, a decision supported by the constitutional court.

Meanwhile the twins’ own political bedfellows are hardly models of propriety. Lepper, the recently sacked deputy prime minister, was accused a year ago of swapping jobs for sexual favours (a charge he denies), while the other deputy, Roman Giertych, a member of Opus Dei, is bent on purging the school curriculum of books by authors suspected of homosexuality. The twins’ nongovernmental media supporter (until the shenanigans of July 10) is the intemperate Father Rydzyk, whose Radio Maryja specialises in homophobic rants and stirring invocations to the Virgin Mary. At the same time a key government media role, the deputy chairmanship of Poland’s public TV network, has been awarded to one Piotr Farfal, former editor of the Polish skinhead magazine Front, which openly supports extremist violence.

Nurtured during the bleak communist era, with scant opportunity or desire to travel, the Kaczynskis grew up believing in the power of a self-sufficient world of patriotic fantasy, fed on stirring partisan songs and tales of wartime struggle. The twins, who celebrated their 58th birthdays in June, began their public life back in 1962 as child actors in a popular film called The Two Who Stole the Moon. The story involves prankster twins who leave home in search of a better world. On their travels they find a city of gold where there’s nothing to eat – emphasising the crucial if banal truth that money doesn’t bring happiness. In their attempt to make a living they persuade some foolish punters to buy the moon from them. The movie, available on DVD, is a rich source of current ironies. There is a story about how they were cast in the roles. They had an uncle who saw an ad in the paper for lively identical twin boys: he wrote in on their behalf in an execrable jokey scrawl, soiling and screwing up the paper for good measure. The application stood out from the rest; they were auditioned and won.

The twins’ father, now deceased, was Rajmund Kaczynski, an engineer who fought bravely in the Warsaw uprising; their mother, Jadwiga, who lives with Jaroslaw the bachelor and his cat, was a philologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Jaroslaw, considered more wily than Lech, was born 45 minutes ahead of his twin. Jadwiga says that as children they were constantly playing practical-twin-jokes and relished games of mistaken identity. She claims that a deep emotional bond exists between them and that they have powers of telepathy. She insists that she never favoured one over the other: “Once they came back from school with long faces, saying that the teacher had asked them whether they had a twin complex. They seemed disappointed that they didn’t have a complex as a result of my loving one more than the other.”

As they grew up, their anti-communist credentials were impeccable. They studied trade-union law at Warsaw University before plunging into the turbulent Labour activism of the 1970s, supporting Lech Walesa in the Gdansk shipyard strikes. They played key advisory roles in the Solidarity movement and were set for high political office when the Jaruzelski regime collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. By 2000, Lech had risen to be minister of justice and attorney general. Jaroslaw followed him into the job when Lech became mayor of Warsaw in 2002 on an anti-corruption ticket. Lech banned the popular gay-pride marches in the city, but his attempts to organise a “straight pride” march flopped.

He earned credit from the older generation for founding a museum in Warsaw dedicated to the wartime uprising. I found it the most depressing exhibition I’ve ever experienced. Housed in a claustrophobic, windowless warehouse, it features peepshows depicting Nazi atrocities, and films of Wehrmacht marching against a background of droning bombers. To get a taste of virtual reality, visitors can crawl through a reconstructed sewer. While the museum lasts, Germanophobia is unlikely to die.

In 2001 the brothers founded a new party – Law and Justice. Jaroslaw became the head, and Lech the deputy, but it was Lech who won the race for president in 2005, an office he keeps, whichever government is in power, until 2009. On taking the oath, he asserted he would never appoint his brother prime minister. As president he is meant to be above party politics, although he shocked the public by admitting during a live broadcast that his presidency was the result of joint political strategy – a “mission” that was now “accomplished”. By June 2006 a rift had grown between Jaroslaw, who was chair of the party, and the incumbent prime minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz. After Marcinkiewicz resigned, Lech went back on his word, appointing his brother as the new prime minister. Thus began a partnership unprecedented in political history – in which the roles of president and prime minister are virtually interchangeable and inseparable.

Jaroslaw started badly, with some significant gaffes and bad publicity. At a party congress last summer TV cameras showed him ignorant of the words of the Polish national anthem: so much for his ardent nationalism. Then he tried to woo the public by holding up a yellow rubber duck during a news conference, saying: “You should feed the ducks [the Kaczynskis’ nickname] as winter approaches.” More recently, Poland’s leading national newspaper, Rzeczpospolita, leaked documents from the files of the former Soviet secret service indicating that Jaroslaw had been investigated for homosexual orientation under the communists. Lech Walesa, who has fallen out with the duo, is much quoted as saying: “When I used to see them both, Lech would turn up with his wife, and Jaroslaw would turn up with his husband.”

As I stalked the twins this summer I found it impossible to tell their faces, figures and voices apart, even though Jaroslaw has a mole on his left cheek. In their twenties, Lech grew a moustache, but it didn’t prosper. According to their mother, they love being together, and even when separated they are glued to each other via the phone. Lech has a mobile, but Jaroslaw refuses one “for fear of people listening in”.

But there are significant personality differences between the brothers. Lech, the president, is married, with a daughter; he is outgoing and sociable. Jaroslaw, the prime minister, is said to be shy, and delivers up his salary to Mum, disdaining banks on account of their habit of practising usury, once forbidden by the medieval church. Lech lives in the miniature presidential palace guarded by ceremonial soldiers in the old city, while Jaroslaw has an official residence with Mum, close to the chancellery, on a private road opposite the Russian embassy. To this day, Mum makes his bed.

Jaroslaw boasts a colourless lifestyle. His favourite food is scrambled eggs, which he likes to cook for himself, and he only eats a proper meal on Sundays. When travelling on nongovernment business he drives a Skoda. He is passionate about stray animals and gives money every month for homeless cats. His only sleeping partner, he admits, is his cat, Alik: “When I come back home, Alik is so happy,” he says, “that he runs around biting and scratching me out of happiness.”

There is a strain of spitefulness, it must be said, in the prime minister. When Jaroslaw’s niece, Lech’s daughter, got married, he refused to attend the wedding because, it was reported, the bridegroom is an enthusiastic member of the opposition socialist party. His political opponents liken him to a pit bull terrier “who worries you till you’re dead”.

Both brothers are practising Catholics, regularly attending Mass and confession. Their religiosity explains the strangest segment of the coalition, a minority party known as the League of Polish Families, headed by Roman Giertych, whose platform is radical moral rearmament and Euroscepticism – at least until the EU is prepared to accept Christianity as a principal plank of its constitution.

I watched Giertych at Mass in the famous traditionalist church of Saint Aleksander in Three Crosses Square in central Warsaw. At 6ft 4in tall, with fanatical eyes, he was a picture of saintly devotion. The brothers appointed him last year as one of three deputy prime ministers, and as minister for education, a job he has exploited to transform Polish youth. Giertych started by laying down an “essential” reading list for schools that includes the popular Christian novel Quo Vadis? by Henryk Sienkiewicz,

John Paul II’s autobiography, Memory & Identity, and a history of Catholic priests in Dachau. He wants to ban Joseph Conrad (a Pole, but too close to Nietzsche for comfort), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russian, obviously), and the works of the Polish Jewish writer and homosexual Witold Gombrowicz.

The minister for education has also ordered that from this autumn all schoolchildren must wear school uniform, so as to eradicate hipster jeans and girls’ tops that reveal their bellies. He is a firm believer in original sin, and wants a return to strict discipline, mandatory teaching “in detail about the killing of unborn babies”, and instruction in “purity”. He seeks to change the history curriculum so as to stress the importance of Christianity as the unifying principle of Europe rather than membership of the EU. Giertych is particularly concerned by what he terms “homo-agitation”, the encouragement of kids to become gay. As part of his campaign to eradicate homosexuality, a children’s watchdog has been appointed. Ewa Sowinska has been investigating the portrayal of the Teletubbies’ Tinky Winky, the one with the handbag, as a potential “homo-agitator”. The jury is still out on Tinky Winky, but teachers suspected of homosexuality can expect to be dismissed.

Against this background, one has to ask what has happened to Poland under the remarkable Kaczynski twins? How is it that the brave nation that prompted the bloodless fall of its own communist regime, leading to the collapse of the Soviet empire, finds itself descending into xenophobia, repression, and a witch-hunt that some experts predict could affect up to 700,000 people and last for 17 years? If it was John Paul II who delivered a vision of freedom for Poland in the 1980s, it was the same John Paul II who first voiced his acute disappointment at the fruits of liberty in his country by 1991. Not only had the first Polish parliament voted for abortion, but it was obvious that freedom had brought privatisation, foreign ownership, asset-stripping, closures and unemployment, leading to a mass exodus of the young and able. As state property was sold off, corruption became endemic, especially under the former communist bureaucrat class that had remained unscathed after the collapse. Throughout the 1990s, John Paul II continued to preach that Poland must reject the false allure of materialism and licence, which were no more than new and more insidious forms of slavery. Only by a mass religious conversion would Poland rise to its true vocation as the Christian beacon for Europe.

The Kaczynskis and their uncomfortable political bedfellows, the extreme right-wing Self-Defence party and the League of Polish Families party, backed by Radio Maryja, believe they have inherited the mantle of the late Pope, but they have their own version of what has led to the state of the nation he so deplored. They are adamant that Poland’s failure to become the New Jerusalem of Europe is owing to the Fourth Republic’s refusal to root out the communists under Lech Walesa. As the Kaczynskis see it, the losers were the exhausted working-class heroes of Solidarity who lost their jobs in the industrial and economic upheavals of the 1990s. The winners, goes the theory, were foreigners, Jewish opportunists seeking compensation, a new class of slick entrepreneurs, and Germany, whose power and influence rose ever higher after unification.

Meanwhile, that Catholic Poland of the mind that had survived more than a century of occupation and partition, was being blighted and eroded by Hollywood movies, mass-market paperbacks, commercial-TV trivia, pornography, pop music and McDonald’s. Somebody had to be blamed for all this. John Paul blamed America and secularist western Europe; the Kaczynskis and their dubious allies blame the former communists, who were never made to suffer for 40 years of repression. Under the twins a tide of frustration, fear and envy, and a desire for revenge, has at last burst its banks.

The challenge Poland poses for Europe, however, is precisely its peculiar version of the ideal relationship between the state and religion. The European ideal, for better or for worse, is for a state that is positively secular, with religion a matter of private conscience. Ireland and Spain (not to mention Britain, whose established church is a powerless anachronism) have both acquiesced to this notion of separation, whereas Poland, while officially rejecting an established religion, sees a seamless marriage of Catholicism and nationhood. Most of the young Poles I have spoken to, both in the UK and in Poland, reject this marriage: some even characterise it as proto-fascism. Whether the EU will tame Poland’s missionary zeal is the big question.

Lech Walesa, deep in retirement in Gdansk, sees only one prospect for Poland: “Shame, disgrace – the whole world is laughing at us. Everything has to be done to interrupt the Kaczynskis’ murder of the Polish nation,” he declares. “We need elections as soon as possible.” The trouble is that even if Jaroslaw the prime minister falls, Lech stays – and with considerable executive powers.

Meanwhile, Father Rydzyk, the unelected power behind Radio Maryja, will continue to sway public opinion with a mix of religion and extreme politics. In the event of the break-up of the Kaczynskis’ fragile coalition, Lech will likely call an election, which might result in a larger majority for Jaroslaw’s Law and Justice party. Then the brothers could operate unshackled by fragile partnerships for a further five years. Poland seems set for a rough ride before the year is out, with far-reaching consequences for its people – and for Europe.

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