The end of the road
Last weeks' decision by the Freedom Union (UW) party, the junior member of the coalition, not to field a candidate in this year's presidential elections, marks a historic development in the party's perception of itself, and carries with it potentially significant implications for the way in which the election will be run later this year.
The decision by the party's National Council comes after weeks of debate within the party, which is faced with a problem that no self-respecting party would relish: namely, that none of its well-known leaders, including Chairman and Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz, actually wanted to stand in a contest that current opinion polls show to be a shoo-in for President Aleksander Kwasniewski. In itself, that is a terrible admission of impotence. But in the case of the UW, which has tended to present itself as the party with the best and most respected politicians, it is an admission of historical defeat.
It is true that UW candidates have always performed badly at presidential elections, losing heavily to candidates who have had greater appeal to the populist instincts of the Polish people. In 1990, the leader of the Democratic Union (as it was then known), Tadeusz Mazowiecki, was humiliated into third place by the upstart Stanislaw Tyminski, a crazed emigre who later evolved into a fantastical leader of a miniscule neo-fascist party. And in 1995, the UW's candidate was Jacek Kuron, an old-time dissident, who failed to cross the 10% barrier of popular votes in an election won for the first time by Kwasniewski. Nonetheless, the entire identity of the UW is built around the axiom that it in some way represents the most noble essence of the anticommunist ethos, itself a historical construct rooted in the 19th century Polish view that the intelligentsia embodies the national spirit.
For this intellectual identity to be put on the back burner on the trifling basis that any candidate had no hope of winning must have been a terrible blow for UW stalwarts. Yet the decision is an inevitable consequence of the new leadership style of party boss Balcerowicz, who has been seeking to move the party away from its traditional core electorate. Balcerowicz has made no secret of his disdain for the party's intellectual old guard, who prefer to spend their time in interminable discussions over the moral dilemmas and challenges of democracy rather than focusing on the more practical businesses of running an effective party machine and controlling the country's money supply. Fielding a candidate for the sake of it is not in Balcerowicz's vocabulary.
At the same time, the decision to pass in this year's elections reflects the fact that a decision to move forward with any candidate other than Balcerowicz who has refused to run risked splitting the party more than ever before in its recent history. It was no secret that Balcerowicz had been tempted to back the candidacy of Andrzej Olechowski, a former finance and foreign minister who has already made an independent decision to run. Yet aspects of Olechowski's past, especially his self-admitted work for Poland communist intelligence services in the 1980s, made it impossible for key members of the UW to support him. Conversely, UW leaders were aware that supporting anyone else than Olechowski would have also split the party not in the leadership, but within its core electorate, many of whom in fact do support Olechowski and would have voted against the official party candidate.
The question now emerges as to the implications of the UW's non-decision for the presidential elections itself. Solidarity Election Action (AWS) leader and putative presidential candidate Marian Krzaklewski quickly put out a statement praising the decision and making a play for the UW's electorate, now looking for a different home. But the fact that Krzaklewski has already made a decision to run a campaign designed to shore up his support on the far right makes it unlikely that many UW voters will move to support him. Instead, the decision makes it more likely that the main candidate against Kwasniewski will be Olechowski, although it remains to be seen whether he will garner enough votes to prevent Kwasniewski winning in the first round with over 50% of the vote. That, too, has become more likely with the UW's move; even in the last presidential elections, substantial numbers of its supporters who could not stomach Kuron backed Kwasniewski instead.
The future implications for the UW itself are mixed. Already, a decision designed to prevent a split seems to have resulted in precisely that, with many senior UW politicians furious at what they see as an abrogation of the party's democratic responsibilities. In the long run, of course, the party will survive, and it may turn out that Balcerowicz's decision to focus energies on the 2001 parliamentary elections will have been the right one. But as of last week, it is clear that the UW will find it almost impossible to resuscitate its image as the party, which, in some mystical manner, has a unique right to power by virtue of its heritage alone.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw Director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl
