It's their funeral
In the future, 2001 will be remembered as the year in Polish politics that marked the end of a very short era, namely the existence of the traditional right as a serious political force. The decisions of last week, which cemented the seemingly permanent division of the right into two competing camps, make realistic the scenario that both may fail to make it into the next Parliament.
The last six months have been a period of intense navel-gazing by the parties that make up the ruling coalition, as they struggled to come to terms with the effects of the defeat of their then leader Marian Krzaklewski in the presidential elections of last year, and the prospect of massive defeat in the upcoming September parliamentary elections. What originally commenced as a struggle for the succession to Krzaklewski as the leader of Solidarity Election Action (AWS) turned into a battle for the heart and soul of the entire center-right, as it increasingly became clear that AWS itself was ceasing to exist. As defeat became increasingly inevitable, so the constituent parties of AWS started looking for alternatives, attracted to the emerging political force of the centrist Civic Platform (PO) on the one hand, and the more radical Justice and Truth movement developing around current Justice Minister Lech Kaczynski on the other.
The result last week was the formal division of the country's right into two camps. One group of parties formed an electoral coalition around Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek and his AWS Social Movement party, while a smaller faction cemented an election coalition around Lech Kaczynski's party. Neither coalition has the support of the Solidarity trade union, which for so long was the catalyst holding AWS together, and which two weeks ago decided to formally withdraw from active party politics and to revert to its classical trade union role. The latest opinion polls are failing to even register Kaczynski's alliance, while one poll last week gave AWS 5%, placing the ruling coalition on the threshold of electoral extinction. The new coalition around Buzek felt pleased when it was joined by the Movement for Reconstruction of Poland (ROP) led by former Prime Minister Jan Olszewski. Yet the truth is that ROP has only ever appealed to a hard core of anticommunist voters and the danger is that this addition to the Buzek camp may only result in a further alienation of more moderate voters.
Many observers are moving to the view that the final disintegration of the traditional right and the creation of the two new lists will do Polish politics a power of good in the long run. On the one hand, it is difficult to envisage Polish voters being prepared yet again say in five years' time to vote back into office the same politicians who have so evidently lost their trust. Yet the Polish right has historically been immune to any serious changes of leadership, with the same failed faces being rotated through successive parties and factions. Political annihilation may be the only method of forcing through a change of political style and leadership.
Secondly, it is increasingly clear that the existing right, dominated by the ethos of the Solidarity trade union, is incapable of generating the policies that Poland will increasingly require in years to come. The priorities of the next decade are to push forward economic policies that will allow Poland to compete in increasingly demanding international markets, and that cannot be done without lower taxes, more flexible labor markets, and less state intervention in the economy. With the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) committed to openly social-democratic and socialist economic policies, the right as it stands has failed to generate a true alternative on economic lines. A good example was last week in Parliament, where the bulk of AWS MPs rejected moderate and sensible changes to the labor code that would have liberalized regulations and created more jobs, as a result of pressure from Solidarity union interests.
The writing is on the wall for the right in a broader sense, in that it seems that the backlash against the right has extended even to the Freedom Union (UW), which looks even more likely to disappear from the political scene at the next election. Last week saw a poll giving them only 3% of the vote. Led by former dissident Bronislaw Geremek, the party seems the victim of wider rejection by the electorate of those politicians and parties who hearken to the past as the center point of their political self-identity. Both AWS and the UW have ultimately drawn their political legitimacy from having been on the anticommunist side during the pre-1989 period. Now the electorate is telling the leaderships of both parties that it no longer regards that as enough to justify their election.
The beneficiary of this increasingly evident collapse of faith is PO, which remains stable in the opinion polls at around 15%. Although staffed by politicians who in the past were also anticommunist dissidents and center-right politicians, they have decided to seek support not through appealing to past glories but by offering a clear policy alternative to the SLD especially in economics. They are solidly free market, proposing a flat tax and distancing themselves from the Solidarity trade union, and challenging the SLD from the point of view of policy, not ideology.
Time will tell whether the PO can emerge over time as the main anti-SLD opposition in the country. But although this scenario seemed unlikely only a few months ago, at least one condition of its success namely the burial of the traditional right seems assured. After the elections, it will be up to the PO to grasp the opportunity that will lie before it.
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)
