Two down, one to go?
Despite the desire of both Solidarity Election Action (AWS) leader Marian Krzaklewski and Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek to resist the pressure from dissatisfied elements within AWS and keep governmental changes down to a minimum, last week saw two unexpected ministerial changes, with potentially a third to come in the next few weeks. Combined with the previous "mini-reshuffles" of the last couple of years, that means that almost half of the current Council of Ministers will not have been ministers when the Buzek government formally took power in the autumn of 1997. But as usual, even these changes have not been without controversy, much of it reflecting the latent tensions between AWS and its junior Freedom Union (UW) partner.
Take first of all the new Culture and National Heritage Minister, Kazimierz Michal Ujazdowski. His nomination came after the sudden death last month of his predecessor, the widely respected Andrzej Zakrzewski. Yet although Ujazdowski comes from the same faction of AWS as did Zakrzewski, Ujazdowski's nomination as minister was met with violent resistance from the UW, as well as from the left-wing Gazeta Wyborcza daily newspaper. Why?
To understand the UW's resentment toward Ujazdowski, one has to bear in mind that the Culture Ministry, under the vast majority of its previous ministers, was in many critics' eyes no more than a tool for extracting state subsidies for loss-making journals, theaters, cinemas and books, and consequently meant employment for those involved in these areas of cultural life. The UW, in turn, has long regarded Poland's chattering classes as a crucial part of its electoral base, so it was no surprise that Ujazdowski, who has made it clear that he intends to be a much tougher minister than his predecessors in rooting out inefficiencies in arts subsidies, has been the subject of attack. Insiders said that resistance to an AWS nomination had never been as strong from the UW as it had been in this case. Moreover, Ujazdowski marks a break from the traditionally politically correct leadership of the ministry, which was in the past prepared to pander to the left-liberal consensus of the cultural elite in return for a quiet life. In contrast, Ujazdowski is a principled conservative concerned with what he sees as the erosion of cultural standards and an obsession on the part of Polish writers and cultural activists with aping the latest Western "isms." That makes him a marked man for Adam Michnik, the editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, who remains fixated on the intellectual legacy of 1960s' left bank intellectuals.
Although the designation of a replacement for Zakrzewski was inevitable, the replacement of Communications Minister Maciej Srebro with Tomasz Szyszko came as a total surprise. It also came at a delicate time for those foreign investors looking at the revamping of the telecom sector and the ongoing privatization of Telekomunikacja Polska (TPSA). Yet Srebro's fall had less to do with the prime minister's vote of no-confidence in Srebro's abilities than with personality: a direct intervention from Marian Pilka, the leader of Srebro's Christian-National Union (ZChN) party faction inside AWS, concerned that Srebro was using his ministerial position to establish an independent power base inside the party to unseat him at the upcoming ZChN congress. Szyszko, in contrast, is a Pilka loyalist and can be relied on to stymie any Srebro-inspired inner-party revolt. In himself, Szyszko, a businessman who is one of the younger generation ZChN figures, is very much on the pragmatic wing of the party and can be broadly relied on to continue Srebro's policies.
It is possible that the series of ministerial changes may continue over the next few months with a change in the leadership of the Interior and Administration Ministry, currently controlled by Minister Marek Biernacki. Biernacki has been earmarked by the AWS leadership as a candidate for the chairmanship of the National Remembrance Institute, which has been set up to allow ordinary Poles access to their former communist secret police files, along the lines of the Gauck Institute in Germany. Were Biernacki to be voted into the position by Parliament, it is likely that the UW will exact a high price for his replacement, especially after their humiliation over the Ministry of Culture appointment, since Biernacki cannot be elected to head the institute without the UW's support. The party fears Biernacki because of his vigorous right-wing credentials, suspecting him of wanting to use the institute's documentation on past secret police collaboration as a political weapon, and it is not inconceivable that it might demand that the ministry pass to the UW, with perhaps Bogdan Borusewicz, current deputy minister, as its head.
That remains to be seen. Poland's ministerial merry-go-round continues nonetheless, with little scope for the respite that the prime minister and Krzaklewski so long for.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl
