Poland A Humiliation For the Party
By THOMAS A. SANCTON Kenneth W. Banta and John Borrell/Warsaw and John Kohan/Moscow
The contrast was stupefying. In December 1981, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa was arrested along with more than 6,000 fellow union members in a martial-law crackdown that seemed to shatter their movement and, with it, all hope of freedom and reform in Communist Poland. Last week Walesa found himself at the center of a very different situation. His forces had just whipped the Communist Party in the country's first truly democratic elections since 1947, causing a constitutional logjam that for the moment left unclear exactly how and by whom Poland would be governed. Walesa, 46, his trademark mustache now gray and his stocky build padded with extra poundage, warned supporters shortly after the vote, "It's too early for congratulations."
Perhaps so. But it was not too early for the world to recognize Poland's remarkable political performance for what it was: in the year of Communism's historic identity crisis -- a time of glasnost in the Soviet Union, brutal repression in China and political unease in the rest of Eastern Europe -- Poland had launched a democratic experiment unique in the Communist world. "It makes us rethink the proposition that Stalinism is eternal," said a U.S. official. "Now we don't know for sure that Stalinism is above being reformed."
The official results announced at midweek showed a Solidarity landslide. Union-backed candidates won 92 of 100 seats in the newly created Senate and 160 of 161 Sejm (lower house) seats set aside for opposition and independent candidates. Although the remaining 299 Sejm seats were automatically allotted to the Communists and their allies, only five of their candidates garnered the required 50% of the vote. Most of those unfilled seats will be decided in runoff elections on June 18.
For the so-called national list of the Communist Party and its allies, a special slate of 35 prominent candidates who ran unopposed, there might be no second round. A majority of voters, eager to reject the whole Communist system, scratched all but two names off the ballot; 33 candidates were defeated and their seats thrown into limbo. That unexpected result triggered a constitutional crisis, since the electoral law requires a full 460-member Sejm but provides no mechanism for filling the vacant seats. Until these legal obstacles are resolved, the Parliament cannot fill the presidency, a powerful new post that was expected to go to party leader Wojciech Jaruzelski. Among the defeated national-list candidates were some of Jaruzelski's most reform- minded allies, including Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski, Interior Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak and Politburo member Jozef Czyrek. Their presence in Parliament was deemed crucial to forming a working relationship between the Communists and the opposition.
The Communist wipeout threatened to shatter the delicate power-sharing agreement that the party and Solidarity negotiated earlier this year. Not only was there a fear of backlash from angry Communist hard-liners opposed to compromise, but there was also a serious question of how the country could be governed when its ruling party had been overwhelmingly rejected by the electorate.
In an unprecedented concession statement, party spokesman Jan Bisztyga told a nationwide television audience on Monday that the "elections were of a plebiscite character, and Solidarity has achieved a decisive majority." Promising that the government would "not back away from the road of democracy and reforms," he called on Solidarity to accept "co-responsibility" for running the country. But Solidarity leaders rejected that astounding invitation to join a coalition government, preferring to remain in opposition and cooperate with the Communists on a case-by-case basis only.
On Thursday, Communist and union officials held an emergency closed-door meeting aimed at breaking the impasse. Determining how to fill the 33 vacant seats was at the top of the agenda. One proposal called for a new vote on those seats in the second round of elections. But many union supporters argued that they should remain unfilled.
Ironically, Poland's resounding display of democracy seemed likely to make other Soviet-bloc regimes -- already bedeviled by reformist rumblings -- rethink the wisdom of opening up the electoral process. Said a senior Western diplomat in Warsaw: "It may have been the worst possible result for glasnost in Eastern Europe. Every Communist Party in the region must now be aware that democratization is the beginning of the end for it."
Perhaps no Soviet satellite was studying the results more carefully than Hungary, which is preparing for its own multiparty elections next year. Commenting on the Polish vote last week, the national Hungarian daily Magyar Nemzet said the Communist defeat "was not only humiliating but also constitutes an incalculable source of danger."
The Polish experience posed a special dilemma for Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. On the one hand, Warsaw's bold moves toward economic and political liberalization would have been unthinkable had Gorbachev not come to power in 1985 and launched his own reforms. On the other hand, the crushing defeat of the Polish Communists could be exploited by Soviet hard-liners as an argument against political reform at home. In fact, Gorbachev's party seemed in little danger of suffering a Polish-style humiliation at the polls. For one thing, the Soviet reform impulse is coming down from the leadership rather than welling up from a grass-roots movement, as in Poland. For another, Gorbachev does not have a large, well-organized opposition to contend with and has ruled out for now the idea of multiparty elections. Yet the debacle of the Polish party must be giving him second thoughts about how much further he can push political democratization without threatening Communist authority.
Whatever reservations Moscow may have about the Polish election, the possibility of Soviet intervention seems extremely remote. Eight years ago, in the heyday of Solidarity's first incarnation, Leonid Brezhnev forced Jaruzelski to break the union. But Gorbachev has long since laid the interventionist Brezhnev Doctrine to rest, repeatedly promising the East * European regimes "mutual respect" and "non-interference in each other's internal affairs." Moreover, Gorbachev considers the reform-minded Jaruzelski an important ally in promoting what he calls "new thinking" throughout the Soviet bloc. Finally, the Soviet leader seems to regard the economic and political experiments in Poland and Hungary as important laboratory tests for the Soviet Union. Thus most analysts doubt that Gorbachev will intervene unless the Polish situation degenerates into chaos.
What finally pushed the Jaruzelski government to the bargaining table was the same thing that sparked the popular uprisings of 1956, 1970 and 1981: economics. Although the regime could drive Solidarity underground, it could not make the country's hopelessly inefficient factories produce more or put food on empty grocery shelves. For more than seven years, Jaruzelski tried to carry out economic reforms while refusing to negotiate with Solidarity or democratize the political structure. The results were dismal: industrial production fell steadily, while the foreign debt climbed to $39.2 billion and inflation crept toward 100%. When public discontent erupted in a series of nationwide strikes last spring and summer, the government finally abandoned its half-a-loaf strategy and in desperation steered into one of the most astonishing U-turns in modern political history by calling for talks with Walesa's banned union.
The so-called round-table negotiations, which began in February, were based on a fundamental trade-off: the regime would consent to a large degree of democracy in exchange for social cooperation on the economy; Solidarity would help secure that cooperation in return for its legalization and a share of power. The centerpiece of the agreement was the cumbersome electoral law that granted the Communists and their allies 65% of the seats in the Sejm and allotted 35% to the opposition; a new 100-member Senate, with veto power over all legislation, was to be chosen in open elections; a powerful presidency, with control over the armed forces and security apparatus, would be filled by the Communist-controlled Parliament. Solidarity allowed the party and its allies a guaranteed majority on condition that the next legislative elections, to be held in four years, are fully competitive and that the President is popularly elected by 1995. The union also extracted a number of other concessions, including legalization of the Roman Catholic Church and establishment of an opposition press.
) In granting these extraordinary concessions, the Communists made three key assumptions. First, that only a Solidarity-led opposition could secure economic cooperation from the public and attract the billions of dollars in Western aid needed to finance the recovery. Second, that by bringing Solidarity into the political process, the party could make it share the onus for the belt-tightening policies that would have to be adopted. Third, that by setting an early election date, the government could prevent the opposition from organizing an effective campaign.
The last assumption was wildly off the mark. Within days after the April 5 signing of the round-table agreement, Solidarity had selected most of its candidates, named a campaign committee, opened its national election headquarters in a former Warsaw bank, set up regional offices across Poland, and recruited 40,000 campaign workers. Within a week, printing presses were churning out millions of handbills, posters and stickers bearing the familiar red SOLIDARNOSC! logo and photos of Lech Walesa. Although Walesa was not running for office, he stumped tirelessly for Solidarity candidates around the country. In contrast to Solidarity's slick campaign, the Communists and their allies flopped miserably on the hustings. Observed a Western diplomat in Warsaw: "That the Communists could not even organize their own campaign is really something. Can it be that they are even more incompetent than they have seemed for 40 years?"
Once the parliamentary problems resulting from the elections are resolved, the government must grapple with the deepening economic crisis. Both sides know what they avoided saying on the campaign trail: effective economic reform will require stringent austerity measures -- including plant closings, layoffs and higher consumer prices. Those steps are sure to provoke strong resistance from the working masses that form Solidarity's main constituency. Solidarity is also likely to face internal squabbles, as factions that supported the union during the campaign -- including the right-wing nationalist Confederation for an Independent Poland and the Freedom and Peace youth movement -- begin to push their own agendas.
Party leaders too face internal resistance from hard-liners and mid-level bureaucrats opposed to any further erosion of their power and prerogatives. Ironically, some of the most intense criticism may come from the party-backed official trade union, the O.P.Z.Z., which was originally set up to replace Solidarity but has become one of the more bitter opponents of factory shutdowns and employment cuts.
Hopes for economic recovery ultimately depend on Western financial aid, something Polish officials now expect as a reward for democratic reforms. In particular, Warsaw is anxious to restructure its burdensome $39 billion foreign debt. Negotiations are now under way between Polish officials and the Paris Club of Western creditor nations, to which the bulk of Poland's foreign debt is owed. West Germany, Poland's largest trading partner and biggest single creditor, last week resumed long-stalled debt-rescheduling talks in hopes that some agreement can be reached before Chancellor Helmut Kohl visits Warsaw late next month. President Bush, who warmly applauded last week's elections, is due to visit Poland next month. Bush had earlier outlined some of the economic steps he intended to take. Among them: eliminating tariffs on selected Polish imports, stimulating private U.S. investment in Poland, working with the Paris Club on debt rescheduling, and encouraging the International Monetary Fund to grant standby credits to Warsaw.
As for the Polish people, they seemed remarkably subdued at this moment of democratic triumph. Compared with the unbridled euphoria that accompanied Solidarity's birth in 1980, there was little public celebrating after the election. Perhaps it was because people sensed the gravity of the moment. More important, they had seen their hopes dashed too many times before. "In Polish society, nobody has the idea of being a winner," explained Solidarity official Alfred Janowski on a visit to Washington last week. "We are so used to always losing." It was to counter such defeatism, rooted in two centuries of foreign occupation, that Walesa told a campaign rally in Gdansk last month, "Whoever doubts must ask himself, 'Has there ever before been such a chance as now?' "