Happy birthday, Mr. Miller
Ten years ago this month, ordinary Poles saw an event take place that many never believed they would live to see: the dissolution of the old Communist Party, officially called the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR). At the time, wags used to say that this was one of the greatest misnomers of history: it was neither Polish (being installed by and loyal to the Soviet Union), nor United (since it was riven by internal squabbling and factions), Workers' (because it spent much of its history at best suppressing, at worst murdering them), or even Party (as in reality it was a trade union of the communist ruling class).
Despite (or maybe because of these Orwellian paradoxes), the PZPR survived 1984 by a mere six years before the events of 1989, namely the semi-free elections of June that year forced Poland's old communists to rethink their attitude to democracy. If the PZPR could not rule in the old way, and could not count on popular support, what was needed was an exercise that would make the party electable in a democratic system. So, on the same date that the party was dissolved, the same delegates in the same conference hall established the Social Democracy of Poland (SdRP) party, which three years later was to sweep back into power at the head of a coalition government with the Polish Peasants Party (PSL), itself a remodeled version of the old communist United Peasants Party (ZSL).
That transformation until today has been at the heart of intense debate in politics, and also on the left. Although the party was formally new, in reality through a variety of legal loopholes (as well as a lack of determination by the first Solidarity-supported governments) it was able to maintain much of the cash and property that the old PZPR had controlled. And although relatively fresh faces were brought in to lead the party, such as Aleksander Kwasniewski, who was later to become president in 1995, at the top leadership level were many of the same faces who only a couple of years later had been either at the helm of the PZPR or one of its youth wing offshoots. That meant organizational talent, which when combined with the inherited cash does much to explain the strength of the post-communist electoral machine, compared with the amateurishness and penny-watching anti-communist side of the political spectrum in Poland.
Although some worthy figures on the left, such as the long-forgotten Tadeusz Fiszbach, or more recently Ryszard Bugaj, tried to form political parties that were openly left-wing but which cut themselves off from the moral and financial inheritance of the PZPR, they failed miserably. Very quickly it became clear that it was the SdRP that was to become the standard-bearer of the left.
The greatest success politically of the SdRP was to win the parliamentary elections in 1993, and then support Kwasniewski in his successful 1995 presidential campaign. Despite revelations in the mid-1990s about concealed Swiss bank accounts, or exposes of the fact that now-leader of the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), Leszek Miller, was the go-between in a KGB-funded hard-currency loan to start up the SdRP in 1990, the SdRP went from strength to strength. The loss of power in 1997 in the parliamentary elections of that year came as a bitter blow to many SdRP leaders, who even until the last minute could not believe that the traditionally disorganized center-right could successfully unite within Solidarity Election Action (AWS), still less unseat them from office. Yet in the last two years, the post-communists are smiling again: Only two more years, they say, and they will be back in government this time, perhaps, with an overall parliamentary majority.
They have cause for optimism. As before, the Achilles' heel of the right has proven to be the right itself, as the tendency to in-fight threatens to destroy the one great achievement of AWS, namely its unity. But much of the credit to the revival of the left must go to its leader Miller, who took over from Jozef Oleksy in 1996, following the scandal around the latter's purported KGB links when prime minister. Miller has not only wielded his own personal authority and organization skills, honed when he was a provincial PZPR first secretary in the 1970s and 1980s, but also brought what was still a fairly amorphous political movement under total control. Key to this achievement was the dissolution of the SdRP last year, and the creation of a second new party, the SLD, technically different from the old SLD which had just been the name for an alliance of the SdRP and a rag-bag of other leftists parties, grouplets, and trade unions. Again, suspicions that this maneuver was equally motivated by a desire to avoid further financial investigations meant nothing to a general public looking for an orderly and disciplined alternative to the increasingly confused AWS.
In the new SLD, Miller rules, having excised from the leadership the most extreme left-wingers, but also a number of prominent "liberals." Few doubt that he is also the next prime minister. But above all, the SLD is increasingly less of a direct link to the past, and more a precise instrument of the political ambitions of the man who seems destined to become the prime minister in 2001.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl
