Andrzej Lepper died « Thread Started on Aug 6, 2011, 10:17am »
Scandal-hit Polish politician Andrzej Lepper dead
Polish populist politician Andrzej Lepper has died at the age of 57 in Warsaw, with police suspecting he killed himself. Andrzej Lepper was a former deputy prime minister.
The leader of the Self-Defence Party was found dead in a party office, police said.
His career in politics was latterly overshadowed by a long-running sexual assault case.
Mr Lepper served in government as deputy prime minister to Jaroslaw Kaczynski in a 2006-2007 coalition.
Police spokesman Mariusz Sokolowski told the Polish news agency Pap: "Police are at the scene ... but all indications are that the politician committed suicide."
Police spokesman Mariusz Sokolowski
Mr Lepper's political career took off in the 1990s when he led stormy protests against government policies he regarded as damaging to farmers.
As leader of Self-Defence, he took the party to 11% of the vote in the 2005 general election.
He joined forces with Mr Kaczynski's Law and Justice Party, becoming both his deputy and minister for agriculture.
However, the conservative-populist coalition fell apart amid infighting, and Self-Defence's share of the vote plummeted to 1.5% in the next election, in 2007.
Mr Lepper, a former boxer and pig farmer, also ran four times for president of Poland.
'Hard man'
Police were called to the party office by one of Mr Lepper's aides - the politician's body was found inside.
"We have ruled out the involvement of third parties," the police spokesman said.
A party colleague, Janusz Maksymiuk, told Polish television he had met Mr Lepper on Thursday and there was "no sign that anything was wrong".
Janusz Maksymiuk
"Lepper was a hard man," he added.
The sex scandal, which erupted in December 2006, shook Polish politics and contributed to the fall of the coalition.
Mr Lepper was convicted of soliciting sexual favours in exchange for job opportunities with his party but he avoided jail by appealing against the verdict, and was awarded a retrial this year.
Regarded by his supporters as a champion of the poor, he once promised to order the central bank to print huge quantities of cash to distribute to the needy, if he took power.
Another populist policy was advocating castration without pain-killers for convicted paedophiles.
His advocacy of a new style of economy situated somewhere between capitalism and socialism gained him some unusual friends, such as Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Polish radio reported.
Lepper's friends Hugo Chavez and Alexander Lukashenko
Mr Lepper had also faced several criminal charges for acts of civil disobedience such as dumping grain on railway tracks and for defaming fellow politicians.
Joined: Jan 2008 Gender: Male Posts: 11,454 Location: Krak`s Town, Lesser Poland
Re: Andrzej Lepper died « Reply #6 on Aug 8, 2012, 9:19pm »
Controversial populist leader Lepper remembered in Warsaw 05.08.2012 17:30 Sympathisers of the populist agrarian Self Defence party attended a ceremony to unveil a plaque dedicated to Andrzej Lepper, whose first death anniversary fell on Sunday.
Andrzej Lepper was the leader of the populist agrarian Self Defence party, which lost all of its parliamentary seats in the 2007 general election amid a series of scandals.
The granite plaque was revealed at the party headquarters in downtown Warsaw after a Mass and march took place with around one hundred party supporters.
Former spokesman of Self Defence and a close aide of Andrzej Lepper, who was found dead in his office on 5 August 2011, told journalists on Sunday that “despite the controversy which [Andrzej Lepper] conjured up around him, he was a unique, one-of-a-kind individual on the Polish political scene.”
Andrzej Lepper was found hanging in his office by his son-in-law. The District Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw determined that no traces of alcohol or illegal narcotics were found in the blood of the politician.
Within days of the death, details of the politician’s financial problems emerged in the press, with revelations that there was no money for petrol or machinery to cover harvesting costs at the Lepper family farm.
The former Deputy Prime Minister, who served between 2006 and 2007 in the Law and Justice coalition government, had also been plagued by a sex scandal which ultimately saw his colleague Stanislaw Lyzwinski imprisoned on multiple charges, including rape.
In March 2011 an Appeal Court in Lodz, central Poland, had granted Andrzej Lepper a retrial over the matter of allegedly trying to procure sex from a female in return for a job.
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