New player on the block
As of writing, the results of the presidential election held on Oct. 8 remain an uncertainty: not so much in terms of whether or not incumbent President Aleksander Kwasniewski will be first in the poll, but whether there will be a second ballot, and if so, against whom the run-off will be. Whether that counter-candidate is the main right-wing contender, Marian Krzaklewski, or the independent Andrzej Olechowski, one thing is clear: it is the latter who will have emerged from this campaign as the relative winner, in terms of constructing a political base that cuts across existing party lines. Until now on the relative fringes of politics, Olechowski has become a political player with a future. But it is precisely because Olechowski's support cuts across existing political lines that he also arouses strong emotions among those politicians who perceive him as a challenge to the existing political order.
Olechowski's past is nothing if not colorful and controversial. He began his public life in communist Poland in the 1970s not as a politician either communist or dissident but as a radio disc jockey. He was also bright: educated at the elite Higher School of Planning and Statistics in Warsaw (now the Main Trade School), he quickly found jobs as a trade negotiator at the Geneva-based UNCTAD and the World Bank in Washington, D.C. in the 1970s and 1980s. As he has freely admitted, during that time he was an operative of Polish intelligence, gathering and analyzing Western economic data and attitudes to Poland's mounting foreign debt. At the end of the 1980s, upon his return to Poland, he was drafted by the then communist authorities to be a member of their negotiating team at the round-table discussions with the Solidarity opposition that led to the dismantling of communism.
The fact that someone who served both communist intelligence and the communist party (although he was never a member of the latter) has been able to transform himself over 10 years into a potential figurehead for a pro-Western, pro-capitalist political movement is nothing if not a confirmation of Olechowski's considerable political talents. His initial brush with power came in 1992, when he was appointed finance minister in the short-lived government of Jan Olszewski. That in itself was a paradox, since Olszewski then and now is despite his rightist rhetoric a socialist. Olechowski did not sit well in Olszewski's government, and he managed to resign before that government collapsed. His next adventure was to become economic adviser to then President Lech Walesa, eventually leading the 1993 election campaign of Walesa's now-forgotten Non-Partisan Reform Bloc (BBWR) party, and promoting Walesa's populist scheme of doling out
zl. 100 million (zl. 10,000 in today's currency) to every adult Pole. He returned to direct politics later that year as foreign minister in the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) and Polish Peasants Party (PSL) government led by Waldemar Pawlak, under the now-abolished constitutional prerogative of the president to nominate that post.
He again left that government at just the right moment to become the co-founder of the free-market 100 Movement (RS) party, together with current head of the parliam entary Foreign Relations Committee Czeslaw Bielecki. But the two rapidly fell out, and when it became clear that the party was on the road to nowhere, Olechowski again nimbly bailed out just in time. Over the last two years he has plied a trade as a consultant and head of the Warsaw branch of the Central Europe Trust company. Now, in the election campaign, Olechowski has decided to test the waters of electoral politics for the first time.
So Olechowski remains a cipher: once a communist spy but now a self-declared Polish patriot; then a servant of the communist party, but recently a founder of a right-wing party; one-time propagator of populism under Walesa, currently a champion of the free market. Few doubt that in essence it is today's Olechowski who is the real man, but it is precisely these past vicissitudes that have led the current political establishment to treat him with caution. His electoral committee has attracted intellectuals and entertainment figures, but few ranking politicians. Leader of the Freedom Union (UW) party Leszek Balcerowicz wanted to support Olechowski, but was blocked by old-guard leaders of the party sensitive to the past.
Yet if Olechowski achieves a credible result on Sunday and still more if he manages to squeak into a second-round battle against Kwasniewski watch for a potential realignment on the Polish right. Following what seems to be a disappointing result for Krzaklewski, it is likely that the centrifugal forces within Solidarity Election Action (AWS) will increase, and that a critical mass of politicians may emerge who will see Olechowski as a potential savior of Poland's anticommunist forces. The fact is that the Polish right has historically proven incapable of generating its own popular leaders, which lays it open to turning to saviors from outside: first the unionist Krzaklewski, now perhaps the chameleon-like Olechowski. Time will tell how and whether Olechowski will seize the opportunities that lie in this latest twist in Polish politics.
