Singing a new tune in Polish politics
With less than four months to go before the national elections, enough opinion polls have been published to give a fairly clear picture of how the results are likely to turn out. The Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) is sure to be the winner, although probably without an absolute majority. Equally certain is the emergence of the Civic Platform (PO) as the main opposition force in the next parliament, perhaps with up to 100 seats. That is a remarkable result for a movement born only four months ago, and which would place it well to make a serious push for power in the 2005 parliamentary elections. It is worth stepping back for a moment, therefore, and taking a closer look at the new player in Polish politics.
The greatest success of the PO has not only been electoral, but the clever way in which its leaders have seemingly successfully managed to repackage a set of goods that many had considered damaged beyond repair. When the movement was established a few months back, its leaders Andrzej Olechowski, Donald Tusk and Maciej Plazynski presented it as a break with the past, and in fact insisted on not calling their movement a party at all. To this day, no formal "Civic Platform" legal identity exists. Its "membership" consists of people who have signed a piece of paper saying they support the policies of its leaders, and promising to join an as-yet unnamed political party that will be created after the elections, on the basis of the PO's parliamentary representation.
The appeal of the "Three Tenors," as the leaders are called in the Polish press, is due in large part to their message that they represent a break with the old elites of Polish politics, and to their claim that they are opposed to the old-style factional politicking that has been the bane of the Polish center-right for the past decade. There is some truth at least in the first part of the claim, in that although Plazynski, Olechowski and Tusk have been part of the political landscape during the past 10 years, none has played either a direct role in government in the past four years, nor a leading role in the leaderships of the traditional political parties. Olechowski has always been a political loner, owing his past governmental jobs (Foreign Minister and Finance Minister) to his perceived individual qualities rather than institutional party support. Tusk, it is true, was a leading member of the Freedom Union (UW), but after 1997 was shunted off to the political backwater as deputy speaker of the Senate and eased out of the top UW party positions. As for Plazynski, his role as parliamentary speaker limited his decision-making position in Solidarity Election Action (AWS), and he remained for a long time ambivalent in his membership of the AWS Social Movement (RS-AWS) party.
Although the PO leadership can claim to be semi-detached from the ruling center-right establishment, it is less clear whether that is the case of PO at large. Here there are mixed messages. On one hand, PO has engineered a novel way of selecting its parliamentary candidates, namely by the use of regional "primary" elections whereby ordinary PO supporters vote at rallies for those who will appear on the electoral lists. Certainly in many cases there have been instances where the winners have been local and regional politicians with a real track record, and not party apparatchiks foisted on localities by the Center. But on the other hand, many of the winners seem to be some familiar faces indeed, standard center-right MPs who have spent the past four years running the country or sitting in Parliament.
That this has happened at all is due to the fact that even the nebulous PO has quickly fallen victim to more traditional internal political hackery. A close look at PO shows that each of the three leaders has developed an informal political organization of his own that has mobilized supporters at each of the primaries in favor of this or that local candidate. Last week's papers were full of stories of old ladies or alcohol-sodden proletarians being bussed in to the primaries and told to vote this way or that by centrally controlled PO activists.
Of course, in the end everyone knew that the claims to be an "anti-party movement" were at best wishful thinking, at worst a specious marketing ploy. On the assumption, however, that all politicians are cynics, PO has done a fairly good job at convincing the Polish public otherwise. It may well be that as the election approaches, and the more voters see that PO is just another political party, that some of the attractiveness of the movement will wane. On the other hand, Poles need not necessarily be concerned at this, since many seem to be looking not for a non-party, but for a party which is a credible alternative to SLD.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at
