That sinking feeling
How fickle politics must seem, if you happen to be a member of the Freedom Union (UW) party. Not nine months ago, the party was the junior member of the current government. It had a swathe of top-level ministers controlling the strategic levers of state: finance, foreign affairs, defense, justice, transport, to name just the top-rank jobs, as well as a run of middle level and regional positions. Today? A sorry reflection of its former glorious self, out of government, hemorrhaging influential leaders, and facing the prospect of permanent marginalization in the face of a nascent political force.
It is difficult to describe Polish politics over the last 10 years without acknowledging the key role current UW leaders played in it. These were the men who at the end of the 1980s formed the core of the political team that sat down opposite the communists to negotiate the transition from communism to democracy. They moved effortlessly into the first democratic government led by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and after a short hiatus, ruled again under Prime Minister Hanna Suchocka. By that stage, this group of politicians had formed the Democratic Union (UD), then the main party of the Polish center.
Although out of power from 1993-1997, they were the only opposition group in Parliament at the time and were accepted as being the future government-in-waiting. They became more dynamic with their merger with the smaller Liberal Democratic Congress (KLD) party to form the UW, and made the key decision to bring in Leszek Balcerowicz, now head of the National Bank of Poland, as their leader. Thanks to his organizational and presentational skills, the UW did well enough at the 1997 parliamentary elections to hold the keys to power for Solidarity Election Action (AWS) and to extract the influence that they had. Most UW politicians believed that they were innately destined for power, and succeeded in persuading most journalists and diplomatic observers that without them, Polish reforms would collapse.
But that was then, and this is now. The decision by politicians Andrzej Olechowski, Donald Tusk and Maciej Plazynski to create a new center-right political movement has triggered what increasingly seems to be a process of total disintegration of this once-proud party. It was bad enough for UW that the new movement was created by one of its leading figures, Donald Tusk, deputy speaker of the Senate. But within hours of last week's announcement, several other leading party figures followed suit, mainly from the former KLD party. Particularly damaging was the defection of Warsaw President Pawel Piskorski and his supporters. Piskorski took with him a substantial part of the UW's Warsaw organization as well as other UW activists and supporters in the provinces. Initially, the reaction of new UW leader Bronislaw Geremek was to downplay the split as a marginal phenomenon, but as the week progressed, the decomposition seemed to get worse. Particularly humiliating was the departure to the new camp of the UW's youth wing, led by its chairman Slawomir Nowak. In a second blow, the prestigious Economic Forum of the party, grouping small and medium-sized business leaders, also defected en masse. Bereft of its youth and business wings, as well as its most dynamic and politically skilled activists, the public impression is that the UW has been reduced to a rump of increasingly aged ex-dissidents and a swathe of central party aparachiks.
Yet the UW discord did not end there, since even those who remain in the party have started to openly bicker about the party's future. In an embarrassingly public spat, Aleksander Smolar, regarded as the party's strategic guru, released an interview to the Polish Press Agency. It called for the UW to ally itself with the post-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) party after the next elections. That statement resulted in threats of further defections by disgruntled parliamentarians and ended in Smolar having to resign his party position.
It seems paradoxical that a movement that is intended to be an alternative to a supposedly shambolic AWS has so far taken the greatest toll of Poland's hitherto rock-solid center party. But in many ways UW has only itself to blame. Its leadership made three strategic errors: firstly, not to run a candidate in this year's presidential elections, allowing Andrzej Olechowski to emerge as a national politician; secondly, to eliminate the Tusk faction from the party leadership at December's Party Congress, leading to a groundswell of dissent; and most crucially, to leave the Buzek government for no clear reason and with no vision of how to return to power either before or after the next elections.
All this happened before the Olechowski-Tusk-Plazynski alliance had even announced specific proposals for their movement; as they do so, many expect further defections. Although the remaining UW politicians are resilient, many of them will surely now view the forthcoming elections with even greater trepidation than AWS, and silently wonder where it all went wrong.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl
