Poland Thanks for Asking, but No

By William R. Doerner

The very idea of submitting a matter of national policy to a referendum was unusual enough. Only once before in its postwar history had Poland held such a ballot, in 1946, and the end result was to legitimize the Communist Party that has ruled the country ever since. But when Poland voted last week on a program of economic reform and austerity, something truly unprecedented occurred: a proposal that had the full backing of the government was firmly rejected. It was the first time in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe that the authorities had lost a vote.

Ironically, what defeated the initiative of Polish Leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski was an electoral provision designed to foil any attempt by opposition forces, however unlikely, to hold a referendum someday on abandoning the Communist system. Under that rule, approval requires a majority not merely of those who actually vote but of everyone eligible to do so. Thus, ( while approximately two-thirds of those who went to the polls voted in favor of both issues on last week's referendum, both were defeated. Only 44% of Poland's 26 million eligible voters responded affirmatively to a question on economic reform, and 46% okayed a related query on "democratization" in Poland. The decisive margin belonged to the one-third of eligible voters who chose not to participate, many to defy the regime.

By most accounts, the government was genuinely shocked by the defeat. Jaruzelski, who had campaigned vigorously for approval, maintained a sullen silence. Government Spokesman Jerzy Urban, by contrast, sought to put the brightest possible face on the vote's outcome. The authorities had "wanted to know the true opinion of the population, an opinion expressed freely," he said, and they professed "satisfaction" with the results.

If the government really did want a reading on popular sentiment, the mystery is why it handled the referendum campaign so ineptly. Just weeks before the vote, authorities announced price hikes on consumer goods for next year averaging 40%, including 110% increases for food staples like bread and milk. A wave of panic buying swept the country as consumers began hoarding goods of all kinds. The approaching increases only confirmed the public's growing conviction that reform was primarily an excuse for a fresh round of price hikes. The choices posed by the referendum, said a construction worker outside Warsaw last week, amount to "asking a man who will hang whether he wants to put the noose around his neck himself or have somebody else do it."

But what many voters overlooked, or disbelieved, was that the reforms were supposed to include such innovative measures as the creation of a capitalist- style stock market to promote private investment, and plans to turn over management of state enterprises to trained professionals rather than party apparatchiks. And nearly all Poles agree that economic change, by whatever name, is not only desirable but also desperately needed.

The years of chaos that accompanied the rise of the Solidarity trade union and the national malaise brought on by martial law in 1981 have taken a severe toll on an economy that was already creaky. Living standards have fallen below their 1975 levels, with wages averaging less than $90 a month. Technologically, the country is so backward that many farmers still plant and harvest from horse-drawn carts, while many factories run on steam-powered . machinery from the last century. Even Lech Walesa, former leader of the now outlawed Solidarity, favors basic economic reforms. "The point is not to fight against the authorities," he said last week. "We must make efforts to achieve structural change."

Under the pressure of dismal economic conditions, Jaruzelski has already begun to usher in some reforms. In a move to consolidate the country's bloated bureaucracy, for example, the regime trimmed 31 government ministries down to 23, eliminating 3,000 jobs. Some analysts speculated that the referendum defeat was actually welcomed by certain factions within the regime, including an odd coalition of hard-liners who resist any liberalization in Poland and ardent reformers who want even more drastic measures. But the outcome provided scant encouragement for those hoping that the belt-tightening reforms would allow the country to begin chipping away at the burden of its $34.5 billion foreign debt.

Poland is not the only East bloc nation facing hard economic times. Rumania, where living standards are even lower than in Poland, appears likely to begin suspending payments on $2.2 billion worth of debt to the World Bank to protest that institution's policy of adding the costs of currency fluctuations to its payback schedule. Meanwhile, authorities announced that leaders of last month's highly unusual protest against the repressive regime of President Nicolae Ceausescu, as well as the management of the factory where the demonstration started, had been fired from their jobs and face prosecution.

In Poland, because the referendum questions were so obliquely phrased, the future course of reform remains very much what authorities want to make it. At week's end Premier Zbigniew Messner announced that the price hikes, originally scheduled for 1988, would be phased in over the next three years. "The government is going ahead with economic reforms," said Letitia Rydjeski, a Vienna-based Poland analyst. "But it will be a tightrope act of introducing increases as high as possible without driving people out on the streets to react." Perhaps. But as last week's vote demonstrated, the streets may no longer be the only place where Poles can register their political views.

With reporting by Kenneth W. Banta and Tadeusz Kucharski/Warsaw