WARSAW – The last few months have been extremely upsetting for Poland’s Solidarity Electoral Action of the Right (AWSP). The AWSP is an election coalition of three parties: the Solidarity Electoral Action Social Movement, the Christian National Union, and the Polish Party of Christian Democrats. Therefore, under Poland’s election law, it needs to obtain at least 8 percent of the vote in the 23 September general elections in order to win parliamentary representation.
However, most preelection surveys have predicted that support for the AWSP is just below the 8 percent threshold. This week, the AWSP charged the left-wing election coalition of the Democratic Left Alliance and the Labor Union (SLD-UP) with “unparalleled manipulation of election polls.” The AWSP stressed that the statistical error in public opinion surveys is usually 3 percent and urged its supporters not to lose heart in the run-up to 23 September.
The AWSP is what remains of the Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS), a bloc of some 30 various right-wing groups that won the 1997 parliamentary election and provided principal political backing to Jerzy Buzek’s government in the following years. The AWS remained relatively stable until last year’s presidential election, in which AWS leader Marian Krzaklewski lost heavily not only to the extremely popular post-communist Aleksander Kwasniewski but also to liberal independent Andrzej Olechowski, who subsequently launched the Civic Platform (PO) group.
Following Krzaklewski’s election defeat, the AWS began to crumble and split. Some AWS defectors, led by Sejm speaker Maciej Plazynski and Conservative Peasant Union leader Jan Maria Rokita, jumped on Olechowski’s election bandwagon. Others joined the Law and Justice (PiS) group that was set up this year by former Justice Minister Lech Kaczynski and his brother Jaroslaw, who were close associates of then-President Lech Walesa in the early 1990s. Polls suggest that both the PO and the PiS will clear the 5 percent voting threshold required for an election committee of a single party or a group of citizens to obtain parliamentary mandates.
What makes the AWSP so unpopular among Polish voters is primarily the four-year record of Buzek’s cabinet, under which unemployment soared to 16 percent. Most unemployed Poles have found themselves in glaring poverty, while many of those with jobs have been continuing an exhausting struggle to earn their livelihood. The AWS-led cabinet undertook four bold reforms — in the health care and pension systems as well as in administration and education. However, all of them were bungled in execution and have provoked wide social discontent. The health care system is believed to be heavily bureaucratized, with too little money spent on looking after patients.
The state-run insurer PZU still has no working computer system to make efficient transfers of money from individual accounts to social security funds. Schoolchildren and teachers remain unsure of what exams should be taken at schools next summer, especially as the SLD-UP is threatening to revoke Buzek’s education reform. And because of apparently too small sums transferred from the central budget to local self-governments, many in Poland resent even the most successful of the four reforms — the administrative one, which vested local authorities with greater decision-making powers than they had before.
While Poland’s socioeconomic woes seem to be the most important reason for the mass disappointment with Buzek’s government in particular and the Solidarity-affiliated political camp in general, they are in no way the only one. Buzek, though widely believed to be a honest person, has been seen as a weak leader. For more than three years, his cabinet was actually run by Krzaklewski. Krzaklewski, in his double capacity as Solidarity trade union boss and AWS parliamentary caucus leader, was a behind-the-scenes operator, molding the government’s policies and utilizing interfactional animosities to achieve his personal goals. Such a complicated and unclear power structure gave rise to many rifts within the Solidarity bloc and eventually forced the centrist Freedom Union (UW) to quit the ruling coalition in mid-2000.
There were also many allegations of corruption among top government officials. Buzek has been constrained to fire four ministers over corruption charges in the past three months. Solidarity, which solemnly pledged four years ago to cleanse politics of corruption, has been deeply hit by corruption scandals itself. Most polls have also predicted that another major Solidarity-rooted force, the UW, will not be able to win 5 percent of the vote and remain in the parliament. This may appear surprising, particularly since the UW is believed to advocate the interests of Poland’s middle class, the group for which the country’s post-communist transformations were doubtless a success story.
This socioeconomic class, according to polls, is well capable of producing two-digit election support for its political representatives. But the UW apparently made a grave mistake at its congress in December 2000, when it opposed a leadership change. Instead of promoting younger and more dynamic activists to top party posts, the UW once again put its trust in such veterans of the Solidarity underground opposition as Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Bronislaw Geremek. The congress was immediately followed by a massive defection — led by Donald Tusk — of UW young activists to Olechowski’s PO. It seems that the PO, with its program incorporating many of the UW’s liberal ideas, has succeeded in winning over the middle-class electorate. The SLD-UP election bloc is poised for a wide-margin victory on 23 September.
Some polls forecast that the bloc may garner nearly 50 percent of the vote and win an outright majority in the parliament. If the AWSP and the UW fail to win parliamentary seats, their political survival will be in serious doubt, to say the least. Such a development may spell not only the end of their careers for some prominent and distinguished politicians, but also the end of an epoch. This epoch began with an overwhelming vote of support installing the Solidarity camp in power, and may end with a no less overwhelming vote casting it into political oblivion.
