Down and almost out
Last week saw the publication of a clutch of opinion polls that, despite their modest ups and downs, show an increasing crystallization of voting intentions prior to this autumn's parliamentary elections. Predictably, it is only the current opposition Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) that has anything to cheer about, since on current trends the only question is whether they will obtain a large enough vote to gain an overall parliamentary majority. On the other side of the spectrum, however, is the Freedom Union (UW), which is facing the prospect of political oblivion as it struggles to reach above the 5% threshold for entering Parliament. If this does indeed happen, it will be a sad and sorry end for those politicians who less than a year ago were at the center of political power.
Yet to fully understand how deep a shock to the political system the collapse of UW would be, one has to bear in mind that the politicians that make up the party's leadership have in one form or another forced the pace of political events in Poland for more than 40 years. Take their former leader, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, for instance. Mazowiecki is best remembered as the first non-communist prime minister since the war, nominated to that post in 1989 in a move that marked the end of communism in Poland, and arguably within Central Europe. Yet Mazowiecki had first emerged on the political scene in the late 1950s, as an independent Catholic parliamentarian in an otherwise communist-controlled Parliament. Throughout the 1960s and then into the 1970s, he continued to probe the limits of possible reform of the communist system, also shaping independent intellectual life through Catholic publications. He played a key role as adviser to the striking Gdansk shipyard workers in 1980 and under martial law in the 1980s maintained his role as an influential force in the underground opposition movement.
Another key personality with a historic role in UW is current leader Bronislaw Geremek, who until earlier this year was foreign minister, and who currently heads the Parliamentary European Law Committee. Although Geremek was a member of the Communist Party until 1968, he left in that year in protest at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. After that he played an increasingly influential role in undermining communist power in Poland, until becoming recognized in the 1980s by underground Solidarity and Western embassies in Warsaw at the time as the chief strategist of the anticommunist underground. Geremek has narrowly missed out on becoming prime minister on at least two occasions in the last decade and many of his closest colleagues admit that it remains his last great unfulfilled ambition.
Indeed, reeling off a list of the best-known UW names would read like a "Who's Who" of Polish politics in the last decade: Hanna Suchocka, former justice minister and ex-prime minister; Janusz Onyszkiewicz, former defense minister (twice); Leszek Balcerowicz, former deputy prime minister and finance minister (twice); and there are a host of names which although meaning little to Western observers are the stuff of Polish political history. Now, almost in a blink of an eyelid, these people may well soon be ejected beyond the boundaries of practical politics, destined perhaps to live out the rest of their quasi-careers in the backwaters of NGOs, research institutes and "advisory" roles to this or that governmental quango. How has this happened?
In retrospect, the decision that seems to have sealed the fate of the party was what is now regarded as the huge mistake of leaving Buzek's government in the late spring of last year. Few remember the tortuous details of those events, other than they had something to do with murky intrigues over the party's influence in Warsaw city council. Yet once UW left the government, while the same time leaving key officials in place in strategic ministries and offices, it effectively emasculated itself as a political force, being neither able to defend the government as a whole, nor able to launch itself into full opposition. Government supporters drifted to Solidarity Election Action (AWS) while opponents gravitated to the SLD. This self-inflicted neutering was compounded by the failure to field a candidate at the presidential elections, under the bizarre logic that any such candidate would fail against Kwasniewski. In the circumstances, independent candidate Andrzej Olechowski stepped in to grab the UW vote and to keep it in his current role as head of the nascent Civic Platform (PO) political movement.
In the future, UW's demise will surely be traced back to PO's establishment, which itself arose out of a dramatic split in UW led by those UW politicians such as former Prime Minister Jan Krzysztof Bielecki who feared that following the removal of Balcerowicz as leader, the party had lurched in a social-democratic direction. PO has indeed successfully replaced UW as the party of Poland's nascent middle class, who perceive a UW without Balcerowicz at the helm as lacking in free-market credibility.
It remains difficult to imagine Polish politics without the presence of sage UW politicians debating this or that nuance of policy. Only a few years ago, such a prospect would have been greeted by the Gazeta Wyborcza daily and assorted Western embassy analysts as evidence of the collapse of Polish democracy. Yet within a few months, it may well be that a brave new world without the UW will be upon us all.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl (mailto:director@cec.com.pl)
