Marek Jan Chodakiewicz |
Bio
18 Oct 2007
Following months of bickering, Poland's populist-conservative coalition
government finally collapsed in September after two years in power. Early
elections are scheduled for this Sunday, Oct. 21. Some suggest that they may
turn into a referendum on de-Communization. To grasp the players and issues at
stake, a whistle stop tour of Poland's political history and geography is in
order.
The Grand Transformation
Poland's current political order took shape at the end of the 1980s. Far from
being an outcome of the democratic process, it is the ultimate progeny of
behind-the-scenes maneuvering and backstage deals. It was not the general
electorate but Communist elites who shaped the system. They eventually invited
other leftists to consummate the deal during the so-called Round Table Agreement
in the spring of 1989.
The conventional wisdom says that in 1989 Poland's Communists willingly gave up
power or at least agreed to share it and to play according to democratic rules.
Western pundits, including such liberal experts as Timothy Garton Ash, purr
about "free" elections of June 1989. In fact, the elections were rigged. Only 35
percent of the seats in the parliament were open to contest. The rest were
excluded: They were reserved for the Communists of the Polish United Workers
Party (PZPR) and their puppet allies from the Democratic Party (SD) and the
United Peasant Party (ZSL). Thus, despite the much hailed Solidarity victory,
which took all but one of the seats open for contest, the communists and their
collaborators retained the absolute majority. It was this very sham parliament
that elected, with the votes of Solidarity's leftists, Communist Poland's last
dictator, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, as the nation's first "free" president. The
election was indirect and Jaruzelski won by a single vote.
Poland's Round Table Agreement, its sham elections, and the presidency for
Jaruzelski of the summer of 1989 were simply links in the chain of events
initiated by First Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in the U.S.S.R. Having assumed
power following the sudden demise of three consecutive Kremlin gerontocrats,
Gorbachev set out to reform the Soviet Union by the dual weapons of perestroika
(restructuring) and glasnost (openness). The latter was to facilitate the
former. The objective was to save socialism and not to destroy it. However, the
outcome was quite different than Gorbachev anticipated. His reforms unleashed
such powerful social and national forces that central control over the events
became impossible, leading to the collapse of totalitarianism in the Soviet
Union and elsewhere in the bloc.
The Deception
In Poland, left to its own devices, the party leadership endeavored to replicate
the deception operation of 1944-1947. This ruse was intended mostly for Western
consumption. At the end of the Second World War and in its aftermath, Moscow
wanted to reassure Washington and London that, following its "liberation" by the
Red Army, Warsaw was indeed "free." Moscow trumpeted everywhere that Poland was
a "democracy" and its opponents were "fascists." At that time, Stalin ruled the
Poles through his local Communist proxies. The occupation by proxy was masked by
a sham "Parliament," in place since 1944, a sham "coalition" government of 1945,
a sham "referendum" of 1946, and a sham "election" of 1947. The trick was also
for domestic use, to neutralize the anti-Communist underground by apparently
providing a non-violent venue to oppose the Soviet occupation.
Throughout this period, the Communists controlled the secret police, the
military, and propaganda. They fiercely put down the anti-Communist insurgency.
However, the Kremlin's proxies ostensibly allowed the accommodationist,
pro-Western, and leftist Polish Peasant Party (PSL) and the Christian democratic
Labor Party (SP) to operate in the opposition, while secretly terrorizing and
assassinating their activists. The Communists further worked closely with
renegade socialists, democrats, and liberals as their puppet collaborators.
This was the same paradigm of deception and control that Poland's Communists
endeavored to implement at the end of the 1980s. Thus, on the political plane,
Jaruzelski and his secret police boss Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak sought out willing
collaborators among Solidarity's leftists and convinced them they were willing
to "share" power with them. This part of the project was sealed at the Round
Table Agreement in April and May 1989, with the Catholic Church, always
preaching non-violence, blessing the deal. The sham "elections" of 1989 were the
next step. Further, to guarantee their grip on power, Jaruzelski became
president and, hence, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and Kiszczak
maintained control of the secret police until April 1990.
As in the scenario of the mid-1940s, the Communists allowed some opposition
political parties to function. However, only collaborationist and
accommodationist groups flourished. They were given state funds and preferential
credit to operate and publish their newspapers, including the main leftist
mouthpiece Electoral Gazette (Gazeta Wyborcza). Anti-Communist groups of course
were not extended such treatment. In fact, there is documentary proof that as
late as June 1989 the Communists assembled proscription lists of Solidarity
dissidents who disagreed with the Round Table spirit. Active measures and secret
police surveillance operations against anti-Communist opposition figures
continued until the mid-1990s, and perhaps later.
The Communist endeavor to retain the reins of Poland's economy was even more
sophisticated. Already in 1988, in congruence with "Polish perestroika," state
decrees were enacted to allow party leaders and managers individually to take
control of their enterprises and commence their privatization. The Communist
"reforms" were "market-like" experiments along what later became the Chinese
model, where the party has never relinquished control.
In Poland (like later in the U.S.S.R. and China), the well-heeled and trusted
members of the Communist nomenklatura simply individually took over the
enterprises they had hitherto controlled on the behalf of the party and the
state. The idea was that no foreign or anti-Communist entrepreneur should have
control. The assumption was that once the contemporary wave of Communist
"renewal" receded -- that is once perestroika and glasnost were over -- the
individual nomenklatura members would revert to the old Marxist-Leninist mode of
control over the economy. Once again, the party would be openly in charge. As it
happened, after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union imploded, the members
of the Communist brass were left handling their nest eggs individually.
A Free Poland
When the Red Army finally withdrew in 1993, Poland became free. However,
meanwhile, the erstwhile Communist bosses solidified their grip on their
now-privatized perks and privileges. They not only retained control of the
enterprises they appropriated for peanuts, but also enjoyed access to
preferential credit. Their post-Communist banker friends at state banks extended
interest-free loans to them and even sometimes encouraged them to default on
payments because the taxpayers would pick up the tab anyway. Pyramid schemes
proliferated and check kiting was common. Next, the kleptocrats savored their
virtual monopoly on government contracts. Since the government was the chief
dispenser of the largesse, Poland's "capitalism" was built by the kleptokrats at
taxpayer expense. The looting of the state treasury proceeded apace. All the
while, the old Communists were lionized as "economic experts" and "new
capitalists." They also enjoyed almost exclusive access to Western investors.
Because there was no de-Communization in Poland, the old nomenklatura remained
at its posts and took full advantage of its position to continue to enrich
itself and wield power.
This nefarious outcome created an enormous amount of cynicism, on the one hand,
and resentment, on the other. The cynics were former Solidarity leftists and
others who joined in and benefited from the new system. Everyone else resented
what came to be known as "The Web" (Uklad). However, until 2005, the Web looked
indestructible.
Next Page: Born in the
original sin of 'free' elections . . .
Exasperation with cynicism and corruption periodically brought Poland's
right-wing to power. Each time, however, the Polish rightists proved inept and
unsophisticated, thus disappointing their electorate and paving the way for a
subsequent electoral victory by the post-Communists. Well-organized and
well-funded, the post-Communists enjoy the overwhelming support of the
"business" community. The right, on the other hand, remains largely wed to
populism and etatism, partly for tactical reasons. Thus, Poland's democracy was
born in the original sin of the "free" elections of June 1989 and has suffered
the consequences ever since.
It is through the aforementioned prism that we should scrutinize the current
political contest in Poland. On the left, it is a struggle to retain as much as
possible from the institutions, structures, and personalities of the period of
the Soviet occupation of Poland. On the right, it is a battle against continuity
of the pathologies associated with Communist totalitarianism. Hence, the
rallying cry of the right has been "law and justice."
Law and Justice
The last Polish coalition government was dominated by the conservative Law and
Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc -- PiS). Its core harkened back to the
Christian democratic Centrist Alliance (PC) of the early 1990s. Its leaders
participated in the human rights dissident movement in the 1970s and in
Solidarity in the 1980s. They participated in the Round Table Agreement but
later rejected the outcome. Throughout the 1990s, they weathered the
vicissitudes of Poland's hectic parliamentary politics, where the disenchanted
electorate periodically "threw the rascals out" so that Communists and
post-Communists alternated with anti-Communists and non-Communists in power, no
single coalition ever winning two consecutive elections.
After the defeat at the polls of the moderately anti-Communist Solidarity
Electoral Action (AWS) in 2001, erstwhile PC leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski founded
the Law and Justice party. He invited broadly understood centrist and rightists
groups to subordinate themselves to him. Like most Polish parties, the Law and
Justice is a confederation rather than a unified and disciplined political
entity.
In September 2001, the PiS won almost 10 percent of the vote and performed well
in the opposition. Four years later, nearly 27 percent of the electorate
supported it, making the Law and Justice party Poland's largest. Further, rather
unexpectedly, the PiS candidate Lech Kaczynski, who happens to be the party
leader's twin brother, also won the nation's presidency in October 2005. The
victors formed a coalition government that, after a while, was taken over by
Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
The Civic Platform
Initially, the electorate and pundits expected Law and Justice to form a
coalition with the centrist Civic Platform of the Polish Republic (Platforma
Obywatelska Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej), the runner-up in the elections with a bit
over 24 percent of the vote. Founded in 2001, the Civic Platform, or PO, is a
hodgepodge alliance of left-liberals, libertarians, and conservatives, most of
whom trace their roots back to Solidarity. The PO leadership participated in the
Round Table Agreement and benefited from it for the most part.
In 2002, the PO and the PiS very successfully ran joint lists in local election.
The former party's vigorously pro-market platform neatly complemented the
latter's socially conservative message. However, when Kaczynski approached PO
leader Donald Tusk to form a coalition government, the Civic Platform leader
declined despite very generous terms. Insiders have revealed that the leaders
clashed over the electoral promise of the Law and Justice party to bring
transparency to the nation's public life, to punish Communist crimes, and to vet
Communist secret police agents. Most importantly, the Civic Platform was averse
to join the PiS on a crusade to destroy the so-called "Web" of informal
connections between politicians, businessmen, and secret police.
The politicians and pundits associated with the Civic Platform objected to
destroying the post-1989 arrangement because, at best, they pragmatically
reconciled themselves with the Web or, at worst, handsomely benefited from it.
The Coalition
After the PO turned it down, the PiS improvised, eventually forming a coalition
government with two small parties: the left-populist Self-Defense Party (Samoobrona)
under Andrzej Lepper and the right-nationalist League of Polish Families (Liga
Polskich Rodzin - LPR) led by Roman Giertych. The coalition partners were
admittedly strange bedfellows, with disparate backgrounds and often-conflicting
agendas. However, they broadly agreed on several issues. These included most of
all state intervention in the national economy, pro-family legislative measures,
and national assertiveness on the international scene, both against Russia and
Germany. The government was national security and anti-corruption minded. It
vowed to restore historical symbols, including most prominently the memory of
the Warsaw Rising of 1944 and the Katyn Forest Massacre of 1940, to their proper
public place. It promised to punish Communist crimes. For the most part, this
socially conservative and mildly nationalist coalition was also staunchly pro-U.S.
and Euroskeptic. Being outsiders, neither the Self-Defense Party nor the LPR
openly objected to destroying the Web. Both publicly endorsed the vigorous
anti-corruption drive initiated by the PiS.
The Left and Business
From the very start, the coalition government came under vicious fire from
within and without the country. Abroad, the European and American media were
egged on by the often-hysterical opposition in Poland. The Civic Platform led
the way, of course. Arguably, however, it was the remnants of the left-liberal
Union of Freedom, in 2005 renamed the Democratic Party (Partia Demokratyczna --
PD), who were the shrillest. The vituperations increased after the PD, along
with a few far-left post-Solidarity and post-Communist groups, including the
Union of Labor (UP) and Polish Social Democracy (SDP), joined the mainstay
post-Communist Alliance of the Democratic Left (SLD) in September 2006. Thus,
the Solidarity leftists, many of whom had originated in the Communist party as
Stalinist and Trotskite dissidents, officially rejoined their erstwhile comrades
in an entity dubbed The Left and the Democrats (Lewica i Demokraci -- LiD).
Their most prominent leaders are former President Aleksander Kwasniewski,
Wojciech Olejniczak (SLD), Marek Borowski (SDP), Jan Litynski (PD), and Janusz
Onyszkiewicz (PD). For their opponents, the Web has come full circle. The
informal arrangements of 1989 were finally formalized publicly, in politics at
least.
In an apparent paradox, the LiD party enjoys the support of many among Poland's
entrepreneurial class. As mentioned, many of them are post-Communist kleptocrats
who benefited from the privatization of the nation's economy. It is because of
such personal connections that the post-Communist governments were perceived as
friendly to the business sector. In fact, they were hospitable toward their
erstwhile comrades who were bankrolling the electoral campaigns of the
post-Communists in exchange, first, for allowing them to appropriate public
assets well below market prices and, then, for awarding the newly minted
"capitalists" government contracts at the taxpayer expense.
The malignantly unnatural structure of Poland's business community explains the
apparent mistrust of entrepreneurs and the preference for government
intervention by the otherwise rather sound Law and Justice party. The problem is
real enough. The persistence of corruption has earned Poland poor marks by
Transparency International for almost two decades now. It is important thusly to
contextualize the behavior of the PiS because the complex reality of Poland's
post-Communist society often escapes even such otherwise astute observers as the
editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal.
Next Page: Maneuvering . . .
Maneuvering
After the collapse of the PiS-LPR-Self-Defense coalition, its participants and
other contenders began their electoral maneuvers. So far, according to the
Polish media, the Law and Justice party sets the pace. Its electoral campaign is
very professional, sophisticated, and, "Americanized," as a respected academic
Zdzislaw Krasnodebski has noted in the centrist daily Rzeczpospolita. The PiS
continues to clamor against the Web and to appeal to tradition and
anti-Communism. It has secured the support of a large part of the Catholic
Church, including some of its media, in particular the staunchly evangelical
Radio Maryja. It even enlisted as its senatorial candidate a greatly respected
former Fighting Solidarity underground leader, the legendary anarcho-syndicalist
and anti-Communist Kornel Morawiecki.
To its right, PiS does not appear to be threatened much by a new, if eclectic,
confederation dubbed the League of the Right of the Commonwealth (Liga Prawicy
Rzeczpospolitej). The League of the Right of the Commonwealth bears no chance of
victory. However, it hopes to wean enough voters away from the PiS to enter the
parliament. For now, it has to deal with defectors. For instance, the LPR's Jan
Szafraniec went over to the PiS and is running for Senate on its list.
The Civic Platform remains the main competition of Law and Justice. However, its
electoral campaign has been lackluster so far. The PO has also suffered from the
defection of two of its high-profile leaders. Having complained about his
party's drift to the left, the conservative Jan Rokita ostensibly withdrew from
politics altogether. Another prominent founder of the PO, Maciej Pluzanski,
switched over to the the PiS. Meanwhile, there is also movement in the opposite
direction. Both the neoconservative odd man out Radek Sikorski and the liberal
speaker of the parliament Bogdan Borusewicz left the PiS for the PO.
At the local level, the Civic Platform has flirted with the post-Communist
Polish Peasant Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe -- PSL). The rural-based PSL
took a serious beating in the polls, having lost much of its base to the
populist Self-Defense. Therefore the PSL leaders have resolved to attract the
urban voter by running former PO politicians for parliament. It is obviously an
advantage for the PO to elect as many of its own as possible from other
electoral lists. By combining its candidates with the PO, as is the case in the
Sub-Carpathian region, the PSL hopes to squeeze into the parliament after all.
Polling
Political surveys in Poland have been problematic for several reasons. First,
most Polish polling companies were launched by Communists and other leftists and
liberals. The owners have been known to try to tip the scales of close contests,
sometimes successfully and sometimes not. In other words, alleged polling
outcomes were deployed as electoral propaganda. For example, in the previous
elections the majority of polls falsely predicted a parliamentary victory for
the Civic Platform and the presidency for its leader, Donald Tusk. The
predictions failed to remain within the margin of error, thus lending credence
to the accusations of manipulation.
Second, Polish respondents frequently lie to the pollsters. Why? It is an old
habit of self-defense developed under Communism. One guessed what the
authorities wanted and one endeavored to deceive the pollster, just to be on the
safe side. Nowadays, people are often reluctant to contradict individually what
is taken to be the collective national wisdom as defined by the mainstream
media, which is mostly leftist and liberal. For instance, since the Law and
Justice party has been excoriated daily in the press and on TV and radio, at
least some of its supporters keep mum or claim other electoral preferences.
Further, "public opinion," that is mainstream rightist and leftist pundits,
constantly appeal for supporting the large parties. They skewer and jeer at
smaller groups, branding them "folkloristic," "exotic," or "extremist."
Therefore, the voters are averse to admit publicly that they prefer, say, the
libertarian-conservative Union of Real Politics. On the other hand, many Poles
are also still ashamed to confess openly that they vote for the post-Communists.
In any event, until recently surveys showed the Civic Platform consistently in
the lead with a bit over 30 percent, closely trailed by Law and Justice with 28
percent. The Left and the Democrats barely crossed 5 percent. Polling experts
have claimed no other party is likely to pass the 5 percent mark and enter the
parliament. However, the most recent independent results by the usually reliable
GfK Polonia polling company put the LiD's support at around 10 percent, with PO
at 26 percent and the PiS at 24 percent. Self-Defense has seen its support jump
to 5 percent, and the Polish Peasant Party to 6 percent. The League of the Right
of the Commonwealth may enjoy around 2 percent of popular support.
A Crystal Ball
All in all, gazing into the crystal ball, at least two scenarios may develop in
Poland. The first, and most obvious scenario has the Civic Platform winning.
Then it would have to form a coalition government. Law and Justice would be the
logical choice, but it is doubtful that the partners have matured enough to
cooperate. Therefore, if it is victorious, the PO will either construct a
coalition with the Left and the Democrats or rule alone as a minority
government.
Second, the voters could treat this parliamentary contest not as an election but
as a referendum on de-Communization, on dismantling the Web. In that case, the
PiS will win. However, it will be too weak to rule alone. Its leaders therefore
hope to split the PO by co-opting its conservative and libertarian elements. The
remnant would then join the LiD and Poland would have a two-party system, just
like the United States.
Whether this will be an election or a referendum hinges on how the voters
perceive the achievements and failures of the Law and Justice party on
delivering on their past electoral promise. But that should be a topic of a
separate inquiry.
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz is academic dean and
professor of history at the
Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. He was formerly assistant
professor of history of the Kosciuszko Chair in Polish Studies at the Miller
Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia. He has authored numerous works
in both Polish and English.RETURN