\n<\/p>\n
Three years apart in age, the brother and sister grew up in a tiny village in eastern Poland, helping out on the family farm and going to church each Sunday under pressure from their parents.<\/p>\n
Today, the siblings, Monika Zochowska, 38, and her brother, Szymon, 41, are separated by a wide gulf opened by politics and outlook \u2014 examples of the many chasms cleaving Poland as it wrestles with the results of a recent general election<\/a> that handed a narrow majority in Parliament to opponents of the nationalist governing party.<\/p>\n Monika and Szymon stand on opposite sides of perhaps the deepest of those divides: the gap between villages and small towns, which voted heavily for nationalist forces, and urban centers, which gave overwhelming support to their more centrist and liberal opponents, notably Civic Coalition, the main opposition party.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Drozdowo, the village where the siblings grew up but which Monika left as a teenager, gave 66 percent of its vote to the conservative ruling party, Law and Justice, and a second, more radical right-wing group, Confederation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In Mokotow, the high-end district of Warsaw where Monika, a successful entrepreneur and supporter of Civic Coalition, now lives, the two right-wing parties totaled only 25 percent.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cShe left. I stayed. Maybe that is why we see things differently,\u201d Szymon, who voted for Confederation, said during a lunch last week in Drozdowo with his parents and his visiting sister.<\/p>\n The urban-rural divide is reinforced by a generational gap that also helped shape the outcome of the Oct. 15 election. For the first time, Poles under 29 \u2014 who often move to cities and are leading what the Roman Catholic Church in Poland recently bemoaned<\/a> as the country\u2019s \u201cgalloping\u201d secularization \u2014 voted in larger numbers than people over 60, many of whom still go to church and tend to tilt conservative.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n With overall turnout at a record 74 percent, women also voted in larger numbers than before, though exit polls indicated that they split their vote fairly evenly between Law and Justice and Civic Coalition. The New Left, the only party that put gender equality and abortion rights at the center of its campaign, fared poorly.<\/p>\n On whatever side they stand in these geographic, gender and generational divides, however, many voters yearn for a less polarized country after a brutal campaign in which Law and Justice and Civic Coalition assailed each other as a mortal threat to Poland\u2019s future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That may be a tall order. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the Law and Justice chairman and Poland\u2019s de facto leader for the past eight years, has cast Donald Tusk, the leader of Civic Coalition, as the \u201cpersonification of pure evil\u201d bent on undermining faith and selling out his country to German interests.<\/p>\n Piotr Zochowski, Monika and Szymon\u2019s younger brother, said he was disgusted by both main parties and cast his ballot for Third Way, a centrist alliance that finished third on promises to calm Poland\u2019s ill-tempered divisions. \u201cThey are the least dangerous,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The demonization of Mr. Tusk as a traitor by the governing party and the public broadcasting system it controls helped rally core supporters to Law and Justice. But it alienated others in a country that is ever more secular, connected to the outside world and increasingly resistant to divisive nationalist messaging.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The father of old-school nationalism is Roman Dmowski, an early-20th-century politician who, after railing for years against Jews and Germany, died in Drozdowo in 1939. He is commemorated in a village museum displaying his death mask<\/a>. The museum has been renovated and expanded with money from Law and Justice, which during the election campaign transferred many of Dmowski\u2019s phobias, particularly his claims of internal enemies conniving with Germany, onto Mr. Tusk. <\/p>\n \u201cTusk, Tusk, Tusk. That is all they talk about. I can\u2019t take it anymore,\u201d said the siblings\u2019 father, Leszek Zochowski. A conservative but open-minded farmer, he cast his vote for Third Way to support one of its components, the Polish People\u2019s Party, a stolid center-right fixture of Polish politics since the 19th century<\/p>\n Monika left Drozdowo as a teenager to study, first in Warsaw and then in the United States and Spain. She now runs her own beauty product company, Glov,<\/a> in Warsaw, where she lives with her partner and their 3-year-old child. Her company\u2019s main product is a patented fiber cloth she developed for removing makeup.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Pregnant with a second child, she had worried about another victory for Law and Justice, which in 2020 pushed through a near-total ban on abortion that forced doctors to put the life of unborn fetuses ahead of mothers\u2019 health. \u201cI\u2019m not young. I don\u2019t feel safe having a child here,\u201d she said. \u201cThey are fighting for fetuses, not me.\u201d<\/p>\n But the main reason she voted for Civic Coalition, she said, was that \u201cit focuses on the future, instead of always focusing on the past\u201d \u2014 meaning Poland\u2019s painful history of occupation and dismemberment by outside powers and the trauma-fed grievances those events have left.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you tell people all the time they are victims, they don\u2019t see opportunities, only enemies,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Szymon also moved to Warsaw for a time but then returned to Drozdowo to grow leeks on the family farm.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The farm is successful but it put him in a different world from that of his sister, who was recently featured in \u201cThe Wives of Warsaw,\u201d<\/a> a Polish version of an American reality television show.<\/p>\n Szymon lives with his wife and their three children in a house next to a yard the family uses to store farm equipment. He attends Mass regularly.<\/p>\n His main political concern is protecting Polish farmers, which is why he voted for Confederation, an unruly right-wing alliance that thundered against Ukrainian grain imports, even though he had run in earlier local elections for Law and Justice.<\/p>\n