Poland: Passing the torch

Prime Minister Marek Belka adopts the opposition’s tactics and calls for early elections, says Wojciech Kosc in Transitions Online. 

Prime Minister Marek Belka eyed the packed room as he took the floor at the Batory Foundation in Warsaw on 4 March. He had come to speak about Poland’s prospects and challenges in the years ahead. But the listeners were more interested in whether he was going to set off a government crisis by declaring his move from the ruling Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) to the newly formed Democratic Party. 

Those who expected Belka to explode a political bomb may have been disappointed. But he lit a fuse that could well lead to early elections, and to his changing party allegiance, by the time spring turns to summer. And many analysts of his speech found hints that the Polish political scene has quietly entered its most tense and bitter political struggle in the past eight years. 

A new party on the scene

In 1997, after four years of rule by a post-communist coalition of the SLD and the Polish Peasants Party, the right-wing conglomerate of several parties under the name of Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS) won power. The AWS campaign called for a thorough modernization of the state after what it called four years of stagnation. 

Today, as another government led by the SLD is struggling to stay afloat in the wake of a series of scandals and its inability to find a workable fiscal policy, the rightist opposition is catching the wind in its sails again. The most important opposition parties–Civic Platform, Law and Justice, and the League of Polish Families–have all strengthened their anti-government rhetoric. The two latter parties do not shy away from being populist, either (on 4 March, parliament narrowly defeated a League-sponsored motion calling for Belka’s immediate resignation). 

The Civic Platform (PO), which leads opinion polls and calls itself the party of common sense–for the most part steering clear of populism–has found itself in a bind. As Law and Justice and the League of Polish Families put forth more and more populist proposals, the PO, willingly or not, has done the same, trying to attract more radical voters at the risk of alienating its core centrist support. 

The new Democratic Party may now be beginning to threaten the PO’s control of the middle ground. In a poll commissioned by Polish Newsweek and published last week, the PO was still the most popular party with the support of 24 percent of respondents, but the Democratic Party scored a respectable 12 percent, level with the League of Polish Families. The populist Samoobrona (Self-defense) came in second with 16 percent support, just ahead of Law and Justice. 

While novelty may account for some of the interest in the new party, the people behind it are not new at all. The core of the party is made up of politicians from the centrist Freedom Union, a coalition partner in the AWS-led government of the late 1990s, including Wladyslaw Frasyniuk, Bronislaw Geremek, and the first noncommunist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki. The party also drew support from within Belka’s government. Economy Minister Jerzy Hausner, architect of a controversial fiscal reform plan, quit the SLD on 7 February, then joined the new party, taking part in its inaugural convention on 27 February. 

Many experts praised Hausner’s plan to impose fiscal discipline, cut the budget, and shed inefficient state-owned industry, but under Belka’s predecessor Leszek Miller, the government watered down the plan for fear of the electorate’s reaction to unpopular spending cuts. 

At the Democratic Party’s launch, co-founder Frasyniuk described the party’s vision of Polish politics: “People expect changes, but not revolution. Polish society does not want to bear the costs of more turmoil. … It wants a strong and economical state that will not look into people’s wallets and under their beds.” 

Belka’s 4 March speech took a similar tack. “We don’t have to destroy the current institutions; they are capable of working properly. Some of them simply need corrections,” Belka said. 

Belka strongly defended the achievements of post-1989 Poland, a topic the opposition has rarely addressed recently. “Poland has never made such a great societal leap forward in such a short time,” he said. “It’s been the greatest period for three centuries. Two million students; the average life span longer by five years. We are the nation of optimists, because pessimists do not take mortgage loans,” he quipped.

To read the full text of the article, visit the Transitions Online website.