Solidarity Battle in Upcoming Vote Spells Deja Vu for Poles

WARSAW — Poles will vote Sunday in parliamentary elections for the fourth time since the Communist stranglehold was broken in 1989. But despite the dramatic changes of the past eight years, the campaign is being dominated by a familiar struggle between left-wing insiders and right-wing outsiders.

In an uncanny replay of Poland’s early democratic votes, a defiant Solidarity trade union is waging battle against the powers-that-be, this time the ruling heirs to the Communist-era Polish United Workers’ Party.

Opinion polls show Solidarity Election Action, a loose assortment of three dozen pro-Roman Catholic groups headed by the trade union, in a virtual dead heat with the governing Democratic Left Alliance, a social-democratic coalition led by successors to the Communists, including Prime Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz.

In elections four years ago, the former Communists staged a miraculous turnaround by winning back Parliament from a splintered collection of Solidarity parties, only a few of which managed to get enough votes to stay in the legislature. They completed the comeback in 1995, when erstwhile Communist official Aleksander Kwasniewski defeated former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa for the presidency.

After four years of bickering and licking its wounds, the resurgent Solidarity opposition is counting on a miracle of its own.

“Once again we are together, once again we will win,” predicted Solidarity leader Marian Krzaklewski, Walesa’s successor and the driving force behind the union-based election coalition.

Yet even with its remarkable revival, polls show Solidarity Election Action has the support of only 25% of the electorate, meaning it would be unable to govern alone. Political analysts say the real winner Sunday will be decided by the smaller parties, especially those with no clear allegiance to either of the major factions.

Both the Polish Peasant Party, a rural partner in the current governing coalition, and the Solidarity-born Freedom Union, the biggest opposition party in Parliament, have refused to rule out partnerships with either Solidarity Election Action or the Democratic Left Alliance.

“The election will be all about coalition building,” said Edward Wnuk-Lipinski, an analyst at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Although the campaign has been dominated by the familiar Communist versus Solidarity ideological rhetoric, analysts say the traditional fault line in Polish politics is becoming increasingly blurred. Sociologist Andrzej Rychard said economic interests now cut across old Solidarity and ex-Communist loyalties, making the political divisions “more complicated and less transparent.”

In a sign of the changing alignments, a recent report by Moody’s Investors Service in New York praised the Democratic Left Alliance as exhibiting “the greatest degree of internal coherence and relative stability” among Polish parties and said it was rapidly developing into a conservative social-democratic party similar to Germany’s Social Democrats under former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

By contrast, Moody’s warned that the new Solidarity coalition has “the potential for some extremely unfavorable economic policy developments,” in part because of disagreement within the coalition about how much state intervention is warranted. The report said some Solidarity elements advocate a “neo-syndicalist approach” to the economy, giving the trade union the right to introduce legislation and veto government budget proposals.

Polish analysts said it is too early to know what direction a victorious Solidarity Election Action, known by its Polish initials AWS, would take because of its diverse makeup and the inevitable influence coalition partners would exert on its policy.

Similar uncertainties, they noted, surrounded the platform of the Democratic Left Alliance in the 1993 elections.

“Some people are afraid of a revolutionary process directed by new rightist forces, but it is very unlikely,” Wnuk-Lipinski said. “AWS has an important trade union stream, but at the same time it has many liberal politicians.”