Warsaw , Poland ( CNN ) -- I stopped on a recent night in front of the palace of the Polish president . I had no choice : The crowd stood so thick that I could not move . We were hemmed between the buildings on one side of the sidewalk and a police barrier on the other . The wide pavement between was obstructed by gawkers watching a strange performance : a weird seemingly incomprehensible little passion play of stereotyped figures . What the hell is this ? I asked an onlooker wedged against me . I kept asking . He answered , but in Polish , leaving me no wiser . I had stumbled across the summer 's big political conflict in Poland : the site of a wooden cross placed to commemorate the accidental death of Lech Kaczynski , the former president of Poland killed in an air crash near Smolensk in April . Admirers of the president had laid the cross at the gates of the presidential residence as a symbol of mourning . In the same spirit , admirers of Princess Diana laid flowers at the gate of Kensington Palace in London . But while flowers disintegrate after an interval , wooden crosses do not . The cross stayed in place for weeks . Supporters lit candles , said prayers . You might expect the crowds to thin as time passed . Quite the opposite . Feelings for -- and against -- have flared and intensified the battle over a cross that has come to symbolize the divisions in Polish society . Kaczynski was not a universally admired figure . Younger Poles , urban Poles , highly educated Poles tended to perceive Kaczynski as rustic , embarrassing . Older Poles , rural Poles , tradition-minded Poles were Kaczynski 's constituency . Like them , Kaczynski upheld traditional Catholic beliefs and mistrusted free-market economic reforms . Kaczynski 's death confirmed both his supporters and his detractors ' views . Supporters saw a Polish patriot flying to Smolensk to pay tribute to the 22,000 Polish officers murdered in the Katyn Forest in 1940 -- and to extract from Russia belated acknowledgement of its crime . Detractors saw an egomaniac trying to upstage his own prime minister , who had made the same trip for the same purpose three days earlier . They quietly suspect Kaczynski pressured his pilot to disregard air traffic control and proceed with a landing in unsafe conditions , resulting in the deaths of 95 others . Supporters have increasingly represented Kaczynski as a martyr , a victim of a mysterious conspiracy organized by the Russians , the New World Order , who knows who ? Detractors are disgusted by the conspiracy theories -- and increasingly impatient with accolades to a president they quietly regard as deeply third-rate . At the beginning of August , Poland 's newly elected president , Bronislaw Komorowski , proposed a compromise . The cross would be removed from the presidential residence and displayed instead in nearby St. Anne 's Church , one of the capital 's most famous monuments . At the original site of the cross , a commemorative plaque would be placed in the pavement . That proposal enraged pro-Kaczynski Poles . On August 3 , more than 1,000 protesters forcibly prevented the removal of the cross . Cross opponents have now begun to stage counter-protests . The opponents have begun to perceive in the cross agitation an attempt to impose a sectarian identity on a state that -- while overwhelmingly Catholic in belief -- is secular in law . `` Crosses belong in church , not at the gate of the presidential palace , '' one cross opponent told me . They see the crowds surrounding the cross as the embryo of a reactionary , xenophobic political movement : a repudiation of 20 years of effort to build a modern , dynamic , European Poland . But pro-Kaczynski Poles see the dismissal of the cross as a dismissal of them . Not all Poles speak English or German , not all Poles use a computer or work for international companies . Many Poles were born slightly too early to benefit from post-communist opportunities : For them , the end of communism meant only the end of a job at a steel mill or a coal mine or a collective farm . They know that city sophisticates disparaged Kaczynski as crude and ignorant . They darkly suspect that these upwardly mobile Poles hold an equally negative opinion of their less successful compatriots . As one Kaczynski supporter told the Financial Times : The cross `` is a reminder that there was a president here who suffered , who was made fun of . '' If you catch echoes here of what Sarah Palin has meant to some of her supporters , it 's probably not a coincidence : a politician disdained by society 's smarty-pants - and who redeployed that disdain to gain the support of those who feel disdained themselves . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of David Frum .
A wooden cross dedicated to late President Lech Kaczynski has prompted division in Poland . David Frum says supporters of keeping cross in place favor more traditional values . He says those in favor of moving cross support dramatic improvements in Polish economy . Kaczynski 's admirers think he was not valued by the elites , Frum says , much like Sarah Palin .