A tale of two presidents
It's not easy being a popular politician in Poland. In a country where people are increasingly used to politics being logically back-to-front, it should come as no surprise to learn that last week two senior politicians, who are probably the only electable politicians that both the ruling Freedom Union (UW) and Solidarity Election Action (AWS) parties have among them, were finding it almost impossible to gain enough political support to succeed in public office. One was former Minister of Finance and Foreign Minister Andrzej Olechowski, and the other current Warsaw Mayor Pawel Piskorski. And the result of this political impotence? The probability that the post-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) party will further tighten its grip on Polish politics nationally and locally.
Take Olechowski first. For weeks now, it has become increasingly clear that both AWS and UW will have great difficulty in fielding a candidate that could credibly challenge current incumbent Aleksander Kwasniewski for the Polish presidency, in elections due in November of this year. Most of the names being touted including AWS leader Marian Krzaklewski himself have raised nary a flicker on the opinion poll scale, while other names suggested such as that of the first non-communist prime minister of Poland Tadeusz Mazowiecki have ruled out running at all. Nature abhors a vacuum, so it was no surprise when more than 20 prominent Polish intellectual and political figures from both the AWS and UW wrote an open letter arguing that Olechowski should stand.
Olechowski is a known figure at the best parties and diplomatic receptions in the capital. Well over six-feet tall and blessed with film-star looks, he is the sort of person that seems ideal presidential material: eloquent in English, an experienced minister, a devout Catholic, and an accomplished businessman. Even though he currently registers only 8% in the polls, private focus groups suggest that he has the best potential of beating Kwasniewski, if only because he seems to have the fewest negative ratings. But Polish politics remain overshadowed by the past, and in these terms for many AWS politicians, Olechowski is insupportable. Unluckily for him, Olechowski has admitted that prior to the collapse of communism he collaborated with communist intelligence services while living in Geneva, and he had the further misfortune of representing the communists at the round-table negotiations that led to the downfall of communism in 1989. Yet since then he had done much to redeem himself by setting himself up against the SLD when he was an adviser to former President Lech Walesa and when in government.
So no sooner than had the cross-party group of supporters promoted his candidature, did most senior AWS distance themselves from him. Even Deputy Prime Minister and UW leader Leszek Balcerowicz has cooled in his support of Olechowski since the latter criticized the takeover of BIG Bank Gdanski (BIG BG) by Deutsche Bank (DB). It remains to be seen if Olechowski will run anyway, despite the views of AWS and UW, and it would not be surprising that in such circumstances he might even do rather well. But the tendency of AWS and UW to nitpick over a candidate that might be their only ticket to success is not an isolated one. Last week also saw another political disaster for the AWS-UW coalition in the form of a failure by the coalition to elect Pawel Piskorski as Warsaw mayor, despite having a majority of votes in the city council.
Piskorski, a UW member, is a new-style breed of young politician who has taken the capital by storm. In so doing he has not been afraid to cock a snoot at the hierarchy of the UW, and unusually for an UW member, he has gone out on a limb in supporting close links with AWS. The result? Massive support among Varsovians, and if Piskorski could stand for direct elections, he would win by a landslide. Yet under local government laws, he has had to be re-elected by the city council, where ordinary voter attitudes cut little ice. In his job Piskorski has stepped on some toes, and so in the crucial vote last week he lost by one vote as a result of AWS councillors reneging on an agreement to support him.
The failure to elect Piskorski by the UW-AWS coalition in Warsaw raises the real prospect that Piskorski, in order to stay in office, will be forced to rely on SLD council votes. If, however, Warsaw fails to elect a mayor, then by law new elections will have to be called which under current opinion polls would be won in the city by the SLD, despite Piskorski's personal appeal, thanks to a collapse in support for AWS. So again, shortsighted political maneuvering has caused the real prospect of power in Warsaw being handed to the communists on a plate, a reflection of political misjudgement at the national level.
Despite the electoral defeat of 1993, Poland's non-communist politicians have seemingly still not learned the lesson that on occasion, political compromise is the only effective way of preserving political power. It seems that more political defeats are ahead, with the only question being: when will they ever learn.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl
