TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/061989/06198900.038

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 14KB | 236 lines

COMMUNISM, Page 24

POLAND

A Humiliation For the Party

But Solidarity handles victory with calm and realism

By Thomas A. Sancton


    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?'"