Police said Lepper’s body was found in his party office in
Warsaw on Friday afternoon. “Everything indicates that he killed himself,”
police spokesman Mariusz Sokolowski said.
The news agency PAP said it learned that Lepper had hanged
himself, but it did not disclose its source for the information. Police and
prosecutors said they were waiting for the results of an autopsy before
commenting further.
Lepper rose to prominence during the 1990s, a time of deep
social frustration in the early years after the fall of communism in Poland.
Many communist-era jobs had been lost, unemployment was stuck around 20
percent, and the country was not yet enjoying the economic boom that came with
European Union membership in 2004.
His outspoken manner won him the votes of the frustrated. To
his supporters, he stood as a daring advocate for the poor and he was sometimes
dubbed “the Polish Le Pen” for his populist positions — a comparison with the
French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.
At one point, Lepper told his supporters that should he come
to power he would order the central bank to print huge quantities of cash to
distribute to the poor. He also called for convicted pedophiles to be castrated
without painkillers.
He lambasted government leaders, sometimes calling them thieves.
He also organized protests by farmers who feared they would be swamped by
Western competition with EU membership.
In 2000, Lepper founded a party, Self-Defense, which became
a junior partner in a conservative-nationalist government that held office from
2006 to 2007. He served as deputy prime minister and agriculture minister in
that government, which was led for most of his short and shaky tenure by
then-Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
Though that government did not serve long, it did so at a
crucial time — soon after Poland joined the EU — creating an impression in
Brussels of a Poland constantly in the grip of political crisis.
In the end, EU membership brought great economic benefits to
Poland’s farmers as well as to the rest of society, contributing to the decline
of his political career. His popularity suffered greatly also due to
allegations against him of sex abuse and corruption. He always maintained that
he was innocent.
The Kaczynski-led government collapsed due to infighting
between the three governing parties and because Kaczynski dismissed Lepper over
allegations that he had solicited bribes.
Lepper was then also accused of soliciting sex from a woman
who worked for his party. He was convicted of those charges last year.
In the last elections, in 2007, his Self-Defense party did
not reach a 5-percent threshold for entering Parliament and largely disappeared
from the political scene. Recent polls indicated the party would not make a
comeback, putting its support at around 1 percent ahead of parliamentary
elections scheduled for Oct. 9.