Presidential contest may be closer than most polls indicate
So how will big business vote in Poland's presidential elections?
Not for the Nobel Prize-winning former president and Solidarity architect, Lech Walesa, judging by a poll of Henryka Bochniarz's confederation of employers.
Walesa got less than 1% support from the 226 of 1000 members who responded to the presidential poll conducted in late summer.
And his successor at the Solidarity union, Marian Krzaklewski, got only 4%.
So the bosses won't vote for the union stalwarts, even if they did topple communism. That's sort of old news by now.
What is intriguing is that the poll shows this is shaping up into a closer race than originally thought. Not the neck-and-neck horse race of the U.S. presidential contest between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush. But far closer than the polls have said would be the case all year.
In the preliminary results, for instance, 57% of the confederation's members said they would vote for the Freedom Union (UW), the party of reformers led by former Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz. And 22% said they would vote for the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), the party associated with President Aleksander Kwasniewski.
But when the final results were tabulated and the question was put in terms of the individual presidential candidates, the result is a bit startling.
Here, 39% said they would vote for Andrzej Olechowski, 44% for Kwasniewski, 4% for Krzaklewski and 1% for Walesa.
Olechowski is running as an independent and is drawing much of his support from the UW, which didn't put forth a candidate. The poll showed that one-third of UW-affiliated members support Kwasniewski, and two-thirds Olechowski.
And 25% said their vote would be different than if they were voting their personal, rather than business, preferences.
Now these aren't your run-of-the-mill Poles. They head some of the largest private companies in Poland and most are "mature adults" over the age of 40. Seventy percent are men, and more than half come from cities with populations over 200,000. Of the companies represented by the members of the confederation, 36% are in production, 35% in service (including the IT sector), 12% in trade and 15% in construction.
Kwasniewski's base is with the tried-and-true SLD supporters and with tens of thousands of young people who are not necessarily "political" or at least, not with the intensity that characterized their elders when half of the adult population was aligned with the Solidarity movement in the early 1980s.
So those young'uns may not be as agitated as Krzaklewski about Kwasniewski's nonchalant statement several weeks that he would have joined Solidarity back in 1980 but there were simply too many others rushing toward that option a "stampede."
What his statement does raise for many political observers is the question of whether Kwasniewski shades the truth as in whether he did or did not actually graduate from Gdansk University. This go-round, he dropped any pretense of saying he had, unlike during his first run for the presidency five years ago. The bit of political embroidery regarding his inclinations toward Solidarity, way back then, is part of the pattern.
And maybe politicians have to be stopped before they polish up the resume a bit too much. That's the crux of the allegations Bush is making against Gore in the U.S. campaign. Of course, Bush is emulating his father in the loose-lips category, talking derisively to his running mate Dick Cheney about a veteran New York Times reporter without knowing a mike was open. His dad was caught telling some union workers right after his debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro that he, in essence, "whipped her ass." His mom went a bit further in the plain-talking field, when asked what she thought of Ferraro, saying it "rhymed with rich."
Not so suddenly, the IT sector is mushrooming. That means lots of new online publications and businesses.
The California-based Industry Standard has started a Polish-language Internet Standard here and hired away Katarzyna Szczesny from the economic section of Gazeta Wyborcza as editor.
Media & Marketing Polska has launched I-biz with Marzena Rehrer as editor. The publication will be a quarterly.
Biznes Polska, started by former Business Journal publisher Thom Barnhardt, has been writing about the boom on their web site. And he's hired Anna Krawczyk-Grabczewska, former editor of the Business Journal's travel magazine (since sold) to do a variety of things including marketing and running the First Tuesday events.
The First Tuesday for September was put off a week (it's set for Sept. 12) so as not to conflict with the Polish Foreign Investment Agency (PAIZ)-Alcat all day IT seminar, which drew a full crowd.
Krawczyk-Grabczewska had worked at PAIZ after leaving the Business Journal. The newly hired project manager for IT and telecom issues at PAIZ is Hanna Pietrowska.
With the U.S. Senate having approved the resolution commemorating the Katyn massacre, the action now moves to the U.S. House of Representatives. But the Solidarity Election Action (AWS) speaker of the Polish Senate, Alicja Grzeskowiak, has invited her U.S. counterpart, Mississippi Republican Trent Lott, to help the Poles think through the next steps.
This could include a larger memorial in Warsaw than the rudimentary one put in place last year next to the military museum. More than 21,000 Polish officers were killed by Soviet troops in three sites in Katyn and neighboring forests in early World War II. The Poles had been POWs in Russia.
