Freedom maneuvers
Although over the last few weeks the focus of attention has been on the disarray within the ruling Solidarity Election Action (AWS) movement, the bloc's former coalition partner, the Freedom Union (UW) party, has also increasingly been feeling the internal strain. Although the UW has in the past liked to present itself as relatively united in contrast to AWS, in truth it is as frequently riven by rivalries as the latter. Moreover, how these divisions evolve over the next few weeks may well have an impact on the make-up of the next Polish government.
The reason for the unusual ferment inside the UW, of course, is due to the decision by the party's leader and former Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz to resign the leadership at the next party congress, slated for mid-December. Although Balcerowicz's focus is now on the possibility of him obtaining the chairmanship of the National Bank of Poland following the unexpected resignation of Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz last month, his departure from his party post had nothing to do with that development, since Balcerowicz decided to resign even before Gronkiewicz-Waltz made her move. Rather, it reflected increasing tension around his leadership, and a slow coalescence of enough resentment to create the real risk of Balcerowicz being outvoted at the congress. Rather than wait to be pushed, Balcerowicz decided to go quietly.
For some months it had been expected that the man who would be guaranteed to take over would be Professor Bronislaw Geremek, former-foreign minister and currently head of the influential parliamentary European Law Committee. Geremek very much represents the "old guard" of the UW, in that he has been intimately involved with the party and all its previous mutations for the past 10 years. In contrast, Balcerowicz was not even a member of the UW until just before he became leader in 1995. This definition of "old-guard" reflects not only Geremek's tenure in the party, but also his vision of politics, a vision he shares with those other colleagues who were in effect sidelined during the years of Balcerowicz's rule. It is not easy to give a quick summary of that vision, but a strong feature of it is a latent social-democratic suspicion of the full rigors of the free market, as well as a parallel belief that culture and values remain important components of politics and therefore of state policy.
Of course, it is an exaggeration to label Geremek as do many Polish commentators as being left wing. In the context of the leadership of a party that has been the driving force of Polish reforms in the past, that is nonsense. But it is no coincidence that this perception of Geremek as representing the center-left element of the party has resulted in the unexpected emergence of a counter candidate in the shape of current Deputy Speaker of the Senate, Donald Tusk. Tusk not only charges Geremek with potentially pulling the party to the left ideologically, but also politically, claiming that after the elections Geremek might be tempted into a coalition with the current opposition post-communist party, the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD). While Geremek has publicly stated that he thinks the UW should try to get more votes by being more attractive to those who voted for Aleksander Kwasniewski in the presidential elections, Tusk has made much of his belief that the natural move for the UW would be to try to take over the terrain vacated by Poland's crumbling right wing, and to make AWS as its natural strategic partner.
In his campaign, Tusk is broadly supported by those UW members who came into the party in 1994 as former members of the Liberal-Democratic Congress, a smaller free-market party that missed out on getting into Parliament in the 1993 elections but which has generated such figures as former Prime Minister Jan Krzysztof Bielecki. Tusk is very much rooted in the classical liberal tradition, having become a major theorist and promoter of writers such Hayek and von Mises even in the 1980s. That is in contrast to Geremek, who was a Marxist in his youth, and who has never entirely shaken off the chains of social democracy.
So the struggle for the leadership of the UW is not only about personalities: it involves a very real debate about the future policies of the party and the intellectual heritage to which it belongs. That will matter if the SLD fails to get an absolute majority in the next Parliament. It is true that at the moment, this seems unlikely. But two things may change between now and the elections next year: firstly, the heat of the campaign will inevitably reduce SLD support and pump up the currently disorganized right, and secondly, it now seems likely that the electoral law will be modified to increase the potential representation of smaller center parties like the UW. That may mean that the SLD will be looking for a coalition partner, and faced with a free choice it might well prefer to co-govern with the UW than with the other opposition party, the Polish Peasants Party (PSL). The consensus among UW members today is that a Geremek leadership would make that more possible than a Tusk leadership, but as ever in Polish politics, only time will tell.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl
