Enfranchisement supporters angry over veto
President Aleksander Kwasniewski vetoed the enfranchisement bill last week, dashing the expectations of many people who had hoped to receive state assets for free. The Sejm will discuss the presidential veto this week, but most MPs now realistically see no chance of bringing the bill back.
Kwasniewski justified his decision by saying the enfranchisement law was legally wrong and socially unjust.
In a statement to the press, Kwasniewski said enfranchisement would ultimately hit the pockets of people on lower incomes. He said the bill would transfer the costs of modernizing communal apartments to tenants.
But Polish Peasants Party (PSL) and Solidarity Election Action (AWS) MPs reacted furiously saying the veto was a political decision by the post-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) to divide state assets among themselves. "The left is aware that once they take power, there will be less to divide between themselves (if the bill was passed)," said Bogdan Pek, whose PSL party supported the enfranchisement bill together with AWS.
Pek said the argument that handing over communal property would unfairly burden lower income tenants with upkeep costs did not stand up to closer scrutiny. "Who is paying the costs at the moment? Everyone carries these costs, they are included in rents that are being paid by tenants," he said.
He said the decision to veto the bill would help ease the government's financial constraints by allowing it to push ahead with faster and cheaper privatization of state-owned property.
Meanwhile, Janusz Lewandowski of the Freedom Union (UW) welcomed the president's move. The UW had fought alongside the SLD against the bill, which they said was full of legal question marks. Lewandowski agreed with the president that the part of the bill referring to communal apartments was unjust. The bill would have transferred the ownership of communal apartments to individuals for free, whereas in the past, those who wanted to own their communal apartments had to pay for the privilege.
He said the politicians attempting to introduce the bill were blind to what was happening in Poland under a market economy. "It (the law) ignores what's happening in the world (economically)," he said. "There's nowhere else in the world where property has been given away like this."
Pek said there was now little hope of bringing the enfranchisement bill back to life. "It's now or never," he said, adding that there was very little chance of overruling the presidential veto. "Considering that the Freedom Union supports the veto, there is no way to get the three fifths of votes (that are needed)."
Pek said it was ironic that the same group of politicians who had forced through the law on the national investment funds (NIFs) in the early 1990s had voted against the enfranchisement bill.
NIFs were part of the Mass Privatization Program introduced in 1993 to redistribute state assets to Poles in the form of certificates. Later, these could be exchanged for shares. Today, the move is largely derided as a failure.
At the time of the NIF deal, Lewandowski was the privatization minister. He said it had been an experience that helped shape his views on the current enfranchisement issue.
Lewandowski said he agreed with aspects of the bill concerning cooperative apartments, referring to a Sejm commission recommendation that new owners of cooperative apartments make gradual payments. But he disagreed with the way the bill had been divided into two parts: one giving people direct property, and another giving away assets in the form of coupons equal to the value of the property.
