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Socialist Review, October 1993

Notes of the Month

Poland

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From Socialist Review, No. 168, October 1993.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

The election results in Poland last month showed a clear shift to the left in public mood. They were a defeat for the president, Lech Walesa, all the government parties, the right wing populists and the church.

People were so sick of the broken promises of the last four years that the most votes went to the democratic left alliance (SLD). The SLD is an alliance headed by the Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland (SDRP), the direct successor of the old Communist Party in 1990. The second highest number of votes went to the Polish Peasant Party (PSL) which used to be part of the ‘Communist’ coalition until 1989.

Only one government party out of seven managed to cross the 5 percent threshold of votes achieved nationally and enter parliament. This was the prime minister’s party, the Democratic Union (UD), which includes well known former dissidents such as Jacek Kuron and former worker Solidarity leaders like Wladyslaw Frasyniuk. The UD got a worse vote than before, not least because it used the prime minister as its main election campaign tactic.

Much press coverage has concerned whether we are seeing a return, even partially, to the old Communist system, to rule by the old nomenklatura ruling class. The result was not a victory for the old Communists taken as a whole. These people have had the best access to capital in the last four years, have taken top jobs in banking, opened businesses and remain comfortably ensconced in the state military, civil service or industrial apparatus. The SLD contains some of them but not most, who are more likely to be associated with the liberals and other right wing groupings.

The SLD is more than a grouping of some of the old CP bosses – it includes trade unions in the OPZZ federation, the biggest teachers’ union and the biggest miners’ union. This integration with organised labour gives the SLD a social democratic character. This time they were joined by part of the tiny Polish Socialist Party who were guaranteed a couple of seats in return for providing the SLD with some left wingers who had fought the old regime.

According to a recent estimate by Aleksander Malachowski, an old dissident from 1956 and now a parliamentarian for the Labour Union (UP), there were 30 percent former CP members among the SLD deputies in parliament before it was dissolved, and he reckoned that not many other parties could boast such a small percentage.

It is true that the new social democracy is led by some figures from the old regime. But the disgust many people feel for the government after four years of cuts, unemployment and lower wages means that they don’t care about the SLD leaders’ past.

The second beneficiary of the elections was the UP, led by Ryszard Bugaj and former Solidarity leader Zbgniew Bujak. In 1989 Bujak and former Marxist opponent of the old regime Karol Modzelewski collected the names of 28 leading Solidarity figures who agreed to join their short lived Group for Defending Workers’ Interests.

Last year Modzelewski and Bugaj were joined in the new UP by some well known regional names from the old CP and Bujak’s Social Democratic Movement. Since its formation the UP has refused to draw closer to the SLD, portraying itself as the left party with clean hands, but it has many former Communist members in local branches.

Apart from the UP, the only other left force to emerge from Solidarity is the union itself which just failed to get into parliament with 4.9 percent of the votes. A Solidarity miners’ MP proposed the vote of no confidence in the government which led to the new elections. Under pressure from below, Solidarity leaders have been prominent at the head of recent disputes, and have for the first time this year come out hard against privatisation.

Lech Walesa is no longer trusted. Soon after dissolving parliament he set up his non-party bloc for supporting the reforms (BBWR), the initials being identical to those of an organisation set up by Poland’s pre-war dictator, Jozef Pilsudski. But the BBWR won only 5 percent of the votes. He is now likely to seek the support of defeated right wingers.

The Catholic coalition, which included the worst fundamentalists who initiated the current abortion ban, failed to get one MP The church boasted that this time priests did not tell people how to vote (the voting was on a Sunday). If it had tried, few would have listened to its advice.

The elections were called after strikes by teachers and public sector workers provoked a mood for general strike in May. The Solidarity leaders deliberately used their MPs to call the vote of no confidence as an alternative to general strike. There have been no national stoppages in the interim. But a few days after the elections miners from a pit in Upper Silesia struck to defend jobs and at the time of writing are still striking.


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