Volume 11 Numbers 1/2

Winter/Spring 2002

Special Reports

Divorce by Mutual Consent
Konstanty Gebert

This was supposed to be a moment of sweet revenge. Twelve years had passed since Poles had triumphantly rid themselves of the long dictatorship of the party on whose last politburo Leszek Miller, now the leader of the Democratic Left Alliance, had served. Ten years, since some of his former comrades, citing his murky Moscow deals and desperate to launder their own political past, had challenged his right to serve in the free Polish parliament. As recently as last year, another former comrade, triumphantly elected and then reelected as "the president of all the Poles," had publicly clashed with him over issues of policy, stressing the difference between his own broad vision and his adversary's supposed party pettiness. For Leszek Miller, the 45-year-old son of a single mother who spent her life as a worker in Zyrardow, a bleak industrial town on the outskirts of Warsaw, the way to the top was paved with adversity. But, as he himself had once said, in his inimitable sexist style, "A real man is recognized by the way he finishes, not by the way he starts off."

And this was to be a glorious finish. The Solidarity-led minority government of Jerzy Buzek awaited the parliamentary elections, scheduled for September, the way a terminal-cancer patient awaits his doom: at least it will be over and the pain will end. Deserted last year by its liberal junior partner-Leszek Balcerowicz's, Bronislaw Geremek's, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki's Freedom Union, which could no longer stomach the ongoing populist onslaught on state coffers-and abandoned in droves by its own MPs, who complained that this onslaught was not nearly strong enough, the government had little support in parliament and even less outside of it. The entire political scene, long dominated by parties emerging from the Solidarity movement, was collapsing. And only the former Communist Party, now relabeled the Democratic Left Alliance (DLA; in fact DLA-LU, since it ran in coalition with the small left-wing Labor Union), remained unaffected by the disaster. Indeed, it emerged strengthened from it. Preelection polls gave the DLA 45 percent of the vote-an absolute majority in parliament. DLA activists were prone to daydreaming about creating a coalition that could muster the two-thirds majority necessary to change the Constitution. And with the presidency firmly in the hands of Aleksander Kwasniewski, also a former DLA leader, until 2005, the stage seemed set for DLA's taking power, keeping power, and enjoying every single moment of it.

Not even the adversaries of Kwasniewski and Miller could argue that this fine finish was not to be. Solidarity was swept to power in 1997, after four years of a DLA-Polish Peasant Party coalition government, which had been voted into office in 1993 in reaction to the incompetence and high-handedness of the successive post-1989 anticommunist administrations. The DLA's record in government had then proven somewhat better, to nobody's surprise; it has to be remembered, however, that the party had taken power exactly when Balcerowicz's painful reforms of the early '90s had started to bear fruit. Though voted out of office-in the next elections-by an electorate that endorsed the newly united right-wing Solidarity coalition, DLA did not lose its base of voters. And while the four years Solidarity spent in opposition had strengthened its appeal, it then proceeded to waste the entire capital of social trust that had so successfully fueled its electoral campaign.

This seems-at first glance-puzzling. Why would the Poles, who were the first to shake off the yoke of an imposed, heavy-handed, and often bloody Communist regime, vote its barely revamped heirs into office four years later? And why repeat the performance, again four years after that?

One possible answer would be that the revamped Communists have changed not only their name (from the United Polish Workers Party [UPWP] of pre-1989 to Social Democracy of the Republic to the current Democratic Left Alliance) but, in fact, their spots as well. At first glance, this seems to be the case. Both in their program and their practice, the successors of UPWP have made it very clear that they no longer are opposed to-indeed, they enthusiastically embrace-democracy, free enterprise, and independence from Moscow. But in this they are no different from the overwhelming majority of political parties that have grown out of the Solidarnosc movement. On the other hand, a majority of DLA functionaries were active in UPWP at different levels. At a very minimum, this element of their biographies is apparently not an obstacle for their electorate. Furthermore, once in power, DLA has clearly indicated its preference for assigning these cadres to state positions, while only occasionally, and with obvious ill grace, making apologies for their political past. The case of General Jaruzelski, who is still defiantly unapologetic for his 1981 coup, and that of Jerzy Urban, his then-press spokesman, who remain trusted figures of the DLA establishment, dramatically illustrate this point. And though these particular figures have not been given state positions, the current prime minister, Leszek Miller, was a member of Jaruzelski's politburo and, to date, has refused to acknowledge any feeling he might have that there is a contradiction between his past and present careers.

This state of affairs, however, is counterbalanced by the protracted efforts of President Kwasniewski, himself an apparatchik of the central party and state apparatus before 1989, to acknowledge and apologize for his and his political party's past. These efforts, though laudatory, have met with a markedly cool reception in DLA as well as from Miller himself. It is legitimate, then, to conclude that if the revamped Communists have indeed made a clear break with their erstwhile program, they still refuse to break politically with their past.

Does this matter? In a democracy, yes. The strategy adopted by DLA seems to suggest that past performance should not be considered important when assessing current political positions and policies. But when an organization's past performance is clearly undemocratic, this casts a pall on the viability of democracy under the leadership of a political force that has adopted such a strategy. And although, on a general level, DLA is certainly no threat to democracy in Poland, its politics on the regional level, its selection of cadres, and its promotion of a vision of recent Polish history from which the Communists emerge largely blameless leads both to political cronyism and to an implicit denial of the importance of democratic values. Such values are not only emblematic of a system democratic in name but are also necessary in practice, over and beyond what is in name only.

None of this, however, has seemed to affect the eagerness of the Polish electorate to restore, both in parliamentary and in presidential elections, the former Communists to power. In all those cases, past and present, their democratic mandate to govern was large, clear, and unambiguous. Why?
The main reason seems to be that there was no alternative. In both parliamentary elections, the revamped Communists ran against ruling coalitions composed mostly of the political forces that had emerged from the Solidarnosc movement. If the voters were determined to throw them out of office-and, given their poor performance, they certainly were-then voting the former Communists into office was the only choice. By failing to create a serious alternative within the democratic camp, the Solidarnosc politicians, in effect, have strengthened and consolidated the Communist vote. One is tempted to look at pre-1989 analogies, when the Communists, by maintaining a monopoly on power-by force, it is true-created a situation in which any attempt at change was necessarily directed specifically against them.

But this is not the only way in which Solidarnosc contributed to its own downfall. Much of the public debate in the first half of the '90s was dominated by attempts to pass laws on lustration and decommunization. The first was intended to root out, publicly expose, and possibly punish all those who had previously collaborated with the secret police in their attempt to eradicate the democratic movement. But the Communist Party had not "collaborated" with the secret police; it used them. The police essentially were forbidden to enroll Communist party members as collaborators. Therefore, the onus shifted from those responsible for the repression to those in the democratic movement itself who-rightly or wrongly-were accused of having been stool pigeons. And as the secret-police archives, notoriously unreliable and often forged, were the main instrument of proving and disproving guilt, not only were the Communists off the hook but the functionaries of their secret police were elevated to the supreme rank of judges awarding or denying certificates of civic virtue. "I have never seen carp voting for Christmas before," said a satisfied Leszek Miller, when a Solidarnosc majority eventually passed the lustration law (carp is a Polish Christmas-dinner delicacy).

Unsurprisingly, lustration (which is still in force) led to an orgy of recriminations within the Solidarnosc camp, as true and false accusations were hurled back and forth, and was used as an instrument in the political struggle among various Solidarnosc factions. None of the movement's leaders, including Lech Walesa himself, then president, was spared, and this contributed heavily to the dramatic loss of public trust in the movement's integrity. On the other hand, people who had been associated with the regime, though not directly targeted at that particular moment, could not fail to draw the conclusion that Solidarnosc was out for revenge and that self-defense was called for. The political base of the revamped communist movement was thus strengthened. But worse was to come when half-baked decommunization projects were aired. Laws debated in parliament (and, at last, mercifully rejected) would have made anyone who had occupied any position in the party ineligible for a wide array of public jobs and positions. But the Communist Party had had over three million members. Together, with their families, they made up more than one fourth of the country's population. Solidarnosc convinced them their future was at stake, and they acted accordingly. The wide Communist electorate was thus reborn.

But these were not the only factors at play-once again-in the elections of 2001. The government of Jerzy Buzek had proven to be as alienated, and as many of its officials corrupt, as its predecessor; this alone opened to ridicule the Solidarity slogan "We took power to return it to the people." The government had undertaken four fundamental reforms: of the administrative divisions of the country, of health, of education, and of social security, which conjointly affected the everyday situation of practically all Poles. These reforms, though universally deemed indispensable, were badly prepared and even more poorly executed. Local patriots often found their towns subordinated to the administrative preeminence of their historical competitors. Patients saw a growth of medical bureaucracy and ineffectiveness, combined with ostentatious spending on offices and health boards. High school students were at a loss to discover the new rules for their future graduation exams. Elderly pensioners struggled with a social-security administration unable to control its own computer system. All this combined with an economic slowdown that brought unemployment up by almost half, from the mid- '90s, to an all-time high of 16 percent. And while the man in the street had the distinct feeling the country was going to hell in a handbasket, even as he was being robbed on the way by the fat cats responsible for the situation, political life was dominated by split and countersplit in the ever more fractious Solidarnosc coalition. And the coup de grâce came just two months before the elections, when the finance minister announced the discovery of a staggering budget deficit of 90 billion zlotys that nobody had noticed any earlier. Official statements about the need to cut social spending, possibly giving up the inflation adjustments of the already low retirement benefits, only served to guarantee that the millions who would be directly affected would vote for anybody but those responsible.

It must be said, in all fairness, that the government was paying the price for daring to undertake reforms that were sorely needed, long overdue, and horribly complicated. It does not seem obvious that any other political force would have acquitted itself any better in that task. In the same vein, Freedom Union had consistently supported economic and social policies that had made it deeply unpopular, and it had brought about a remarkable economic jump forward for the country. The two parties lame explanations-"Just give us some more time, and we will set things right"-did not, however, fall just on deaf ears. They fell on the ears of very angry people who felt they had been defrauded and lied to, people who were eager to hear these feelings confirmed politicians who had not yet been blemished by the burden of office.

Under these circumstances, DLA would have been forgiven if it had not even bothered to campaign, so sure it could be of victory. But campaign it did-hard and to the very last minute. With a professionalism that could put all other electoral staffs to shame, the party relentlessly pursued every single vote. Leszek Miller let it be known that he would not govern with less than half the seats in parliament; the discontent with the current government was so deep and widespread that it seemed implausible that his party would fail to score even at that high threshold.

The voters, as expected, did deliver a crushing blow to the parties in power, rightly considering them responsible for the mess they were leaving behind. Solidarnosc, which ran as a coalition of several right-wing parties, failed by less than 1 percent to pass the 8 percent electoral threshold demanded for coalitions and was thus eliminated from parliament. Freedom Union fared even worse. Though it had left the government over a year ago and had been quite vocal, at times, in its criticism of government policy, it scored barely over 3 percent, falling well short of the 5 percent threshold for political parties. More telling still was the abysmally low number of votes even its best politicians attracted. Former foreign minister and party leader Bronislaw Geremek, running in Warsaw, scored best-with barely 27,000 votes. The DLA's highest achievers, by comparison, crossed the 150,000-vote threshold. And Wladyslaw Frasyniuk, legend of the underground in the '80s and contender for the Freedom Union leadership, bagged only 2,500 votes in his home city of Wroclaw. Thus, almost none of the architects of Polish politics over the last four years-and, in a larger sense, throughout the entire postcommunist transformation-were present when the new parliament convened for the first time. The political life of their parties, as well as their own political lives, appeared to be over.

At least almost none of the old guard-since a group of slick political operators, who had dumped both parties earlier this year and joined the political bandwagon of Andrzej Olechowski, the black horse of last year's presidential election, scored 13 percent of the vote and thus became the second largest group in parliament. Using savvy marketing techniques, these people managed to present themselves as political newcomers, disassociated from the existing parties and bearing no responsibility for their track record. Under the name of Civic Platform-not a party, as they stressed, but a citizens' movement-they threw a lifeline to the center and center-right electorate of Solidarnosc and Freedom Union, which refused to vote for these parties again, but could not stomach the idea of voting for DLA. Civic Platform has been called Poland's answer to Forza Italia, without, however, the TV channels, FC Milan, or, for that matter, even a Berlusconi. It is unclear what, apart from liberal economics, EU integration, and a cavalier approach to their own political past, these politicians stand for. Still, they grabbed the more responsible part of the protest vote.

But a protest vote is an unpredictable phenomenon. Though most of it accrued to DLA, Miller's party was robbed of the prize-an absolute majority. With 216 out of 460 seats in parliament, the former Communists were facing a dilemma. Either they would find a coalition partner or run a minority government-or else head for new elections in a matter of months. And given the fact that only 46 percent of the Poles had bothered to vote, it was conspicuously unclear how new elections would go. For Civic Platform is not the only new party in parliament. Apart from DLA, and its Communist-era sidekick, the Polish Peasant Party, everybody else is new. These newcomers rode into parliament on the protest vote and would probably stand to gain from a new round of voting. On the other hand, they also need time to consolidate their new political identities, and, programmatic issues aside, they are not interested in coalitions. Hence, a Lithuanian solution-with all the parties in parliament except the former Communists ganging together to deny the winners the spoils of victory-seemed highly implausible under these circumstances.

So, with whom could DLA enter a coalition? Miller and his friends still shudder at the memory of the time they shared power with the Peasant Party, four years ago. The junior coalition partner had exploited its position to the hilt, demanding and obtaining the position of prime minister, key ministries, and an open line of credit for patronage payoffs. The former Communists would prefer not to risk repeating that experience, though they would brave it if all else failed. The point is, the Peasant Party lost half of their vote to Samoobrona (Self-Defense), a party of agrarian protest that considers the Polish Peasant Party little better than corrupt traitors to the cause, irrevocably wedded to the trough. Another stint at coalition politics would only fix this image in the eyes of the voters. At this stage, entering government would be tantamount to political disaster for the Peasant Party. If so, it would extract a very high price for such a risky deal.

Samoobrona itself, which came in third in the poll, was the biggest surprise of these elections. The movement is headed by an extremely capable leader, Andrzej Lepper, sometimes called, with reference to the French populist leader of the '60s, Poland's Pierre Poujade. Lepper turned his struggle against the system-which had saddled his farm with a debt he was unable to repay-into a nationwide crusade. Samoobrona has been around for a decade, though in extraparliamentary protest politics only. It specialized in occupying public buildings, blocking roads, throwing (metaphorical and literal) manure at public officials, and, in general, making a nuisance of itself. Lepper personally has around 200 court cases pending, though he has spent only a few days in jail, and has turned those into a media circus. He routinely calls all public figures crooks and thieves and believes Leszek Balcerowicz should go to jail for wrecking the Polish economy. Apart from the Peasant Party his particular bête noire is the Solidarnosc movement, since police forces had been used against him during both four-year periods of Solidarnosc rule. His relations with DLA (he himself is a former Communist Party member) remain much better. Lepper's campaign slogan-"They've all been there"-was catchy and successful, as were his demands for wholesale purges of "corrupt officials who have been bleeding the country dry," the introduction of a legally guaranteed minimum wage, and unrestricted unemployment benefits.

He is very mistrustful of Poland's drive for EU membership, although he believes he could stomach it, "if done on our terms." With this left-wing program, he would be a natural partner for DLA-but DLA is not that left wing itself. The party's minister of finance-designate Marek Belka had announced, only a few days before the elections, that he would broadly continue the liberal policies of his predecessors and cut spending to reduce the deficit. These brave words doubtlessly cost DLA quite a few votes, "But at least we will not be accused of lying to our voters," quipped an otherwise quite unhappy Miller. For Lepper, however, Belka and liberal economics are anathema; he would join a coalition with DLA, he said, but, as with the EU, only on his terms. In both cases, the prospect was unlikely.

But DLA stood even less of a chance with the two other potential coalition partners: the League of Polish Families and Law and Justice. Both come from the right wing of Solidarnosc and are deeply steeped in anticommunism. For the League (roughly Poland's Front National, with several wannabes arguing over which of them is Le Pen), a coalition with Miller would be literally unthinkable and, given the illiberal, Catholic nationalist, anti-EU, and-to an extent-anti-Semitic program of this party, the feeling is probably reciprocal. The importance of the League is elsewhere. The party was created and promoted by Catholic broadcaster Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, a latter-day Father Coughlin, whose Radio Marya reaches a four-million-strong audience and has emerged as one of the powers in the land. Too extreme even for Poland's otherwise stolidly conservative primate Jozef Glemp, who had criticized it for insubordination, Radio Marya was the last bastion of an anachronistic, reactionary vision of Polish identity and politics. Given the spectacular success of the League, it has changed into a beachhead for an attempted reconquest by an ancien régime.

Law and Justice, finally, is a one-issue law-and-order party, set up by former justice minister Lech Kaczynski. Although Poland has one of the largest per capita prison populations in Europe, rising criminality and a dysfunctional law-enforcement system have created strong public support for repressive legislation. It is unclear what else this new party stands for.

But the same is true of all four newcomers. Still giddy from their success and gloating over the defeat of forces that, since 1989, simply were the sum total of Polish politics, they all need a cooling-off period to reassess themselves and decide on strategies. In all four parties, the leaders barely know their MPs, and the MPs are essentially all these parties have now. Even if ideology or program would allow them to enter into coalition politics, common sense dictates they stay out of power until they are sure they can survive the experience. But Poland needed a government. In other words, DLA needed a partner to go to bed with-whatever the price.
In the end, it turned out to be a no-brainer. Since new elections would hardly affect the political makeup, unless it was for the worse-those who had previously not bothered to vote might change their minds and vote antiestablishment, further upsetting an already rickety applecart-a deal had to be struck with those at hand. And since the right was determined to stay in the opposition, the only choice for DLA was which "peasant" party to marry.

Originally they seemed to opt for Samoobrona. Communist votes gave Lepper the position of deputy speaker of parliament, which shocked even the most avowedly cynical observers of the political scene. But within two weeks his career was over. He first joined in a riot against a court order evicting illegal peddlers from a city square in a provincial town. He continued by calling the minister of foreign affairs a "scoundrel" and accusing a number of leading politicians of corruption, citing names, places, dates, and sums. It immediately transpired, however, that the said politicians were not present in any of those places at the time, and the procurator's office started investigating him for slander. He tried to excell himself by exposing a bankrupt collective farm in northern Poland as a producer of anthrax for the Taliban, who allegedly were to come to pick it up "in black helicopters" (a possible throwback to the Lyndon LaRouche training he had received at Germany's Schiller Institute). But by then nobody was listening anymore.

Eventually stripped of parliamentary immunity, and of much public support, as reports of fraud he had committed against his own supporters started to be made public, he already seems to be a figure of the past.

This left DLA no choice but the Peasant Party, and a coalition was eventually forged. The Peasant Party, to no one's surprise, started gobbling up positions and jobs (a former Peasant Party defense minister was appointed head of Poland's power plants, because, as the DLA minister of the treasury said disarmingly, "He wanted to take a try at business"), fighting Brussels in an attempt to protect smallholders' interests in Poland's future EU accession, and routinely breaking coalition agreements. And so the Peasant Party voted against the government both on lifting Lepper's immunity (peasant solidarity above all) and changing the system of counting votes in the forthcoming local elections (it believes the old system is better suited to its interests).

In the meantime, the new government's honeymoon is over, while the national crisis is not. Unemployment is up to 18 percent, plans to rereform the health system by centralizing it, yet again, have forced even some critics of Buzek's reform to reconsider, and wholesale dismissals of CEOs at state companies appointed by the previous government-fired for that reason alone-have sorely affected Miller's image. If this trend continues, however, the ex-Solidarnosc camp will not be getting its voters back. Once again disappointed and deceived, they will probably not bother to vote the next time. Or if they do, they might place their trust in, say, Andrzej Lepper-or in the many Lepper wannabes.

Konstanty Gebert is the founder, former editor-in-chief, and current publisher of Midrasz, a Jewish intellectual monthly published in Poland. He is also a frequent contributor on international affairs to Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's largest daily newspaper.

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