Battle of ideas
Do ideas matter in politics, least of all Polish politics? Looking at the current state of the center and center right, seemingly obsessed with internal personality battles, few would venture a positive answer. Both in the ruling Solidarity Election Action (AWS) and in-limbo Freedom Union (UW), recent weeks have seen the attentions of activists focused on attempts to remove their current leaders, Marian Krzaklewski in the case of AWS, and Leszek Balcerowicz in the case of the UW. Important as these personality battles are, in both cases they mark a deeper dispute as to the long-term ideological direction of both political movements.
Take the case of the UW. Although very much a machine at the service of former Finance Minister Balcerowicz to the casual outside observer, the party has in fact never overcome the deep conflicts dating back to 1994 and the merger of the Democratic Union (UD), a UW forerunner, and the Liberal-Democratic Congress (KLD), an influential pro-free market party that had been a major player in Polish politics in the early 1990s. Originally suspicious of each other, the two political movements were brought together in the face of the defeats that both suffered in the 1993 parliamentary elections. The election of Balcerowicz as leader in the mid-1990s was the final act in a process that seemed to cement Poland's main center party in a clear free-market position, and mark the demise of its previous style of politics.
Yet the tensions between Balcerowicz and his main political allies inside the UW those party members that had previously been KLD activists and the old guard of the UD never disappeared. As long as Balcerowicz brought political success, those differences remained submerged, but as it has become increasingly clear in the last few months that the UW is continuing to languish in the political doldrums, these splits have returned to the fore with a vengeance. It now looks increasingly likely that Balcerowicz will lose the leadership of the UW by the time of the party congress due in mid-December in favor of former Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek. With that change will come a shift in both the style of leadership within the party, and the substance of policy as presented to the outside electorate.
While it was Balcerowicz's style to dominate his party by force of personality, and shift its focus to budgetary and macroeconomic issues, Geremek is much more of a consensual politician, in tune with the mood of the old-guard of the party, and also privately much less concerned with the minutiae of economic policymaking than Balcerowicz. Last week at the UW's monthly leadership meeting, Geremek made an open play for power, stating that the UW should look for more voters among those who voted for President Alexander Kwasniewski at last month's presidential elections. That signals a perceptible and clear shift for the UW toward center-left voters should Geremek become the new leader.
A similar debate is afoot within AWS, although much more deeply submerged underneath what publicly remains the key issue, namely the future of Krzaklewski and the internal structure of AWS. In the eyes of those politicians currently challenging Krzaklewski, the latter's removal from power is certainly a necessary condition for the movement's revival, but by no means sufficient. There is a deeper debate afoot as to whether AWS's future lies in continuing in the manner that Krzaklewski demonstrated during the presidential election campaign, namely tacking to the rightist wing of the movement, or whether its only hope is to seek out those voters who have deserted the movement since 1997, many of whom voted for election runner-up Andrzej Olechowski. Olechowski's constituency remains tempting not only to some UW leaders, but also to AWS itself, who see AWS' only hope as rebuilding a majority national constituency of Poles who accept the need for the country's modernization and openness to the West, but also remain attached to national and traditional values.
That feat of combining a program of modernization with an acceptance of tradition has been successful in the case of the Fidesz party in Hungary under the leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. The question remains whether it will be possible to institute a similar trend in Poland. Yet while most right-wing politicians instinctively recognize that is the way forward, they remain restrained by the very real institutional power wielded by Krzaklewski, and the difficulty of either removing him or forcing him to change ideological tack without his agreement. It may well be that it will take a massive electoral defeat by the right in next year's parliamentary elections, and a subsequent generational turnover, to clear the ground sufficiently for the required policy shift to take place.
Under both Balcerowicz and Krzaklewski, the UW and AWS have been uncomfortable bedfellows. It may well be that under new leaders, both parties will recognize that in the current conditions of Polish politics, there is no political or ideological alternative to cooperating in the shape of a permanent political alliance against the center-left successfully dominated by the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD). But the likelihood is that only electoral defeat for both parties will finally bring into reality what has been theoretically obvious for some time.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director @cec.com.pl
