The showdown approaches
All eyes were on the fate of Treasury Minister Emil Wasacz last week, who on Saturday faced a vote of no-confidence against him in Parliament. The conclusion of the Wasacz affair when the hapless minister found himself under violent attack from the least expected quarter, namely his own party by no means marks the end of squabbling inside the ruling Solidarity Election Action (AWS) alliance. Instead, many now expect the last act of a play that has been running in the background of Polish politics to finally emerge.
As has been noted here on previous occasions, the assault on Wasacz is in fact only partly provoked by resentment at the minister's policies from his own party members. To be sure, there are strong factions within AWS that dislike Wasacz either because he is perceived as being too radical or too conservative on privatization, depending on which side of the ideological spectrum any particular AWS MP happens to be on. But the strength of emotion surrounding the vote over Wasacz would not have been so high were it not the case that some powerful AWS parliamentarians view the dismissal of Wasacz as a means of effecting broader changes within the AWS parliamentary club and in the government itself.
AWS leader Marian Krzaklewski is now paying the price for a decision taken early on in the life of the current Parliament to maintain the informal style of leadership that had been successful in winning and maintaining power inside the Solidarity trade union, of which he is also leader. That involved avoiding establishing any formal decision-making structure, ensuring that whatever direction there was evolved through consultations among a tight nucleus of union and personal friends, many of whom did not possess any formal position in the rudimentary AWS national structures. That informality prevailed both at the national AWS level, and also within the AWS parliamentary club. To Krzaklewski, that was natural: After all, he had been responsible for AWS's electoral success in 1997, and since its future success would also be a function of his leadership, so preservation of that leadership became synonymous with the good of AWS as a whole.
The problem with the above vision of AWS was that it ignored the fact that AWS was not merely the alliance of supporters of Marian Krzaklewski, but also a complex balance of interests of the political parties that made up the AWS coalition. Although these parties had failed miserably in making any popular headway before 1997, their leaders were often men of genuine intellect and integrity who quickly came to resent being ignored by the upstart union leader from Solidarity. At first this resentment was contained to the extent that AWS maintained its lead in the opinion polls, roughly until the late autumn of 1998. Since then its catastrophic slide, pointing to massive defeat in the 2001 parliamentary elections, has meant that the party leaders have ceased to see any merit in continued loyalty to either Krzaklewski or to the man who they now revile as his impotent stooge, Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek.
Few outside observers realize how openly AWS politicians sneer at both men, and although they are possessed of enough loyalty to the ideals of AWS to resist the AWS renegade MPs who voted against Wasacz on Saturday, they have no intention of backing off from their determination to cull the leadership of those they see as responsible for AWS's decline. In the aftermath of the Wasacz vote, expect to see the leaders of the main parties inside AWS the Christian-National Union (ZChN), Conservative People's Party (SKL), and Polish Christian Democratic Alliance (PPChD) to launch an open revolt against the leadership of AWS and Buzek himself. Their message will be: "We fought to save Wasacz, but the growth of indiscipline that led to the rebellion has its causes. That cause is yourselves." As a minimum goal, they will demand a change of the prime minister, and the introduction of a streamlined and transparent mechanism for taking decisions within AWS both inside and out of Parliament. That, they feel, is the only move that will clear the political air and instill a modicum of discipline into a movement that is now fighting not to win an election, but merely to survive it.
Polish politics are now entering a sea of murky waters that may well result in a period of governmental paralysis that could last months. The complexities of the Polish constitution make any attempt to change the government without provoking new elections at which AWS might be annihilated an extremely risky maneuver, and there is no mechanism to change AWS itself other than persuasion of Krzaklewski himself. Indeed, were Krzaklewski and his supporters to resist such changes, they could easily do so simply by doing nothing: It is their active engagement that is required to pull off both tasks successfully. Ultimately, it will be only through a realization that the alternative to making a risky change is total political destruction at the hands of the post-communist left that this last chance for AWS's rehabilitation will be grasped.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl
