Enfranchisement bill looks set to slide through Senate
Following a few days of heated debates and intense legislative revision, last Friday the Senate appeared poised to pass the controversial universal enfranchisement act that would allow Polish citizens to gain ownership rights to state-held assets for free.
A little more than three weeks after the bill was passed by the Sejm, last Friday market watchers and politicians at all ends of the political spectrum anticipated that the controversial law would glide through the upper house without significant resistance. The bill was to be voted on Friday night.
"Unfortunately, I am afraid that it will be passed," said Zbigniew Kulak, a Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) senator from Leszno in western Poland. "AWS (Solidarity Election Action) has a decided majority in the Senate."
Viewed as a way to compensate Polish citizens for the wrongs of the communist era, the enfranchisement act creates the mechanisms for average Polish citizens to acquire state assets free of charge. Under the law passed by the Sejm on July 14, tenants in residential cooperatives and renters of city- or treasury-owned property would have a right to take ownership of their flats at no cost.
With the presidential campaign heating up, the success in the Senate is an important feather in the cap of AWS politicians who gained a majority in the Parliament in the last elections on a pro-enfranchisement platform. For AWS, introduction of the enfranchisement law not only fulfils election promises, it is also viewed as a way to win votes in the upcoming presidential election. Judging by the opinion polls, AWS candidate Marian Krzaklewski needs all the support he can get. According to recent tallies presented by polling organization OBOP, only 10% polled said they would back Krzaklewski at the ballot box. In contrast, if elections were held soon, Aleksander Kwasniewski, would most likely earn the backing of 66% of the electorate.
Despite the success in the upper house predicted last week, the version of the law that the senators finally voted on last Friday looked substantially different from the one accepted by the Sejm three weeks ago. In the countdown to the final vote last week, members of two Senate commissions were scrambling to introduce roughly 150 changes to the original bill. The majority of these amendments were submitted by AWS.
"The work atmosphere in the Sejm was extraordinarily tense, which made it difficult to come up with a perfect form of the law," said Tomasz Wojcik, an AWS Sejm deputy who was one of the two main authors of the bill. Last week he worked alongside senators to make necessary amendments before the final vote. "There were things that we wanted to appear in the law that wouldn't have had a chance (to make it through) in the Sejm."
A key change introduced by the Senate concerns the thorny issue of garden allotments. In contrast to the Sejm's bill, senators opted to include tenants of small garden plots in the enfranchisement process. Up to now these tenants had access to plots by paying membership fees to associations that managed tracts of parcels in a given area. Under this version of the law, these associations could potentially be dissolved as users claim title to individual lots. According to the National Garden Allotment Association, more than 970,000 individual garden plots cover some 44,000 hectares of land mainly in urban areas.
While the option to gain title to the small pieces of land may be a boon for some gardeners whose land is located on prime urban real estate, others are concerned that the introduction of the enfranchisement law will mean the disappearance of these recreation areas altogether. By parceling out ownership rights, some new landowners could decide to convert the property to other uses that would destroy the recreation character of the enclaves.
"The introduction of the enfranchisement law will be the end of these garden allotments," said Magdalena Kondracka-Seweryn, a journalist at the National Garden Allotment Association.
For others in the property market, such fragmenting of ownership is an urban development disaster waiting to happen. In key development areas of cities, this fragmentation could lead to development nightmares that could block both public and private city development projects, said Jerzy Hendrich, director of Commercial Property Services, a Wroclaw-based property consultancy.
"This is an absolutely crazy idea that will lead to plenty of problems," Hendrich said. "This could potentially block critically located plots of land within cities for many, many years."
While the moves to encompass garden plots displeased some, in contrast other changes to the draft law introduced in the Senate earned wider approval. Most significantly, in an effort to ensure a level of parity in the value of the residential apartments acquired by Polish citizens, the Senate opted to set limits on the value of the property passed on at no charge. Two options emerged in debates last week as the criteria used to set these upper limits. Some senators were pushing for a limit of zl. 100,000. If the assessed value of city-owned apartment exceeds this amount, the resident will have to pay the difference into the city coffers. Other senators were pushing for the limit to be set in square meters. In other words, tenants would have to pay for any apartment space that exceeds 50 meters. By press time it was not clear what option would be passed in the final vote.
Though the Senate vote is an important step to getting the law onto the books, some doubt whether it will make it past the desk of the president, who has a right to veto the bill. Despite pressures on election eve, most in the SLD party are betting that Kwasniewski ultimately won't sign the bill.
"Up to now President Kwasniewski has been directed by reason and care for the national interest," Kulak said. "In this situation I expect that he will act rationally, even if it initially costs him a few percentage points in public support."
