Presidential elections
This month's presidential elections are a major challenge for the Polish population. Sections of the conservative right, supported by parts of the Solidarnosc trade union bureaucracy, are threatening to "take action" if the popular ex-Communist candidate, Aleksander Kwasniewski, wins.
by Zbignier Koraleruski
Warsaw, October 1995
THE NEO-LIBERAL RIGHT, with its origins in Solidarity, was defeated in September 1993. The Alliance of the Democratic Left (SDL), led by Social Democracy of the Polish Republic (SdRP) found itself in government, in alliance with the Polish Peasant Party (PSL), itself formed from a satellite party of the Stalinist regime. This was an earthquake. The Stalinist regime had fallen hardly four years ago. No one could have imagined that political currents with their roots in that hated regime, even transformed, could return to power, especially in so short a time. The former anti-Stalinist opposition, which had been carried to power by the masses, was deteated by the popular vote in 1993, because successive governments from this current had made severe attacks on the interests and social gains of the workers. The restoration of capitalism was proving more difficult than the ideologues of the market had expected. The success of the Alliance of the Democratic Left was an expression of the protest of large layers of the working and popular classes against the disastrous social consequences of "shock therapy" and the policy of capitalist restoration. THE SDRP IS NOT A STALINIST PARTY, despite its origins. The old Stalinist party, the Polish Unified Workers' Party (PUWP) dissolved once it lost power. The creation of a social democratic party in its place was no mere camouflage operation. The PUWP was the political organisation of the state bureaucracy and, towards the end of Stalinist rule, of the first nomenklatura capitalists. The new SdRP, deprived of state power, could hardly be perceived as a political representative by state bureaucrats or capitalists, even those whose roots were in the old bureaucracy. Primitive accumulation of capital in Poland is too closely linked to the state apparatus, and the parties of government for such a thing to happen. The SdRP was forced to shift its social terrain - towards the salaried masses, and to use the support of the former Stalinist trade unions. These are the majority unions nowadays, as a result of the discrediting of Solidarity in the eyes of most workers, as the result of the way the former independent union has fallen under the political control of the right, and protected "shock therapy".
The SdRP might be a left wing party, but it does not represent a left alternative to the restoration of capitalism. The pro-liberal wing which leads the party wants to restore the market economy, win the support of the capitalist sectors, cooperate with the Catholic church, and link itself to the world bourgeoisie and the imperialist powers. They want to join the Europe of Maastricht and NATO. The left-voting electorate thought the SdRP would be a barrier against the right, and a defender of the population's social gains. Once it was elected, the party immediately forgot its promises (which had in any case been as vague as possible), and set about managing the restoration of capitalism. In the search for a compromise with the right, the SDL government ceded to president Walesa control over the key Defence, Interior and Foreign Affairs Ministries. It also renounced support for the re-legalisation of abortion, and for protecting the non-confessional nature of the state. The economy has grown under the SDL-PSL government. But the salaried layers have not benefited at all. Real wages of employees in the productive sector are hardly rising. The income of health and education workers is still falling. Unemployment is no longer rising (at least in the official statistics), but there is no plan for a struggle against mass unemployment (at least 17%) and its social effects. The rhythm of privatisation has slowed considerably, but the government is trying to speed it up, and to continue dismantling the essential part of state-owned industry. Nevertheless, the SdRP remains the hegemonic force on the Polish left. "The other left", the Union of Labour (UP) formed from the old anti-Stalinist opposition and Solidarity, and reinforced since by transfusions of members from the old Stalinist party, has different origins, but shares the same essential political nature. It too is a social democratic party, and one of secondary importance. The UP also benefited from the left turn in voter sympathies in 1993, and is wellrepresented in parliament. But it has no base in the trade unions. The UP not only refuses to form a united front with the SdRP against the right, but has been trying to form a coalition with the liberal right Free Union (UW) in order to chase the SdRP out of government.
International Viewpoint n° 271 — November 1995 11
* Poland
The SdRP-PSL has an absolute majority in parliament. The right is represented by the Free Union and a number of parliamentary opposition. The SdRP-PSL is in government, but has only limited power. The right is torn apart, and outside government, but still holds considerable power. Through Lech Walesa it has the Presidency of the Republic. It has control of the army, the political police, the national bank, and the national television stations. This "cohabitation" is increasingly conflictual as the right becomes more and more radical, faced with a second electoral defeat. OPINION POLLS give SLD candidate Aleksander Kwasniewski (SdRP) 25% of potential votes. The second left-wing candidate, the independent Tadeusz Zielinski, State Spokesman for the Rights of the Citizen, has little chance of reaching the second round. Zielinski is supported by the Union of Labour (UP) and the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). The leadership of the UP had originally proposed Jacek Kuron as candidate, but delegates at their conference refused to support a man who is also the candidate of the party of Leszek Balcerowicz, the architect of the "shock therapy". Zielinski's victory over Kuron has provoked a crisis in the Union of Labour. Honorary President Karol Modzelewski, a Kuron partisan, has left the party in protest. The right is presenting a range of candidates, in an uncoordinated fashion. The independent candidate Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, Director of the National Bank had until recently, more support than either Walesa or Kuron The slogan of her campaign is the struggle "against feminism and the subversion of the Christian moral order". The ecclesiastic hierarchy is openly intervening in the election campaign, joining with the right-wing to appeal to Poles to bar the way to the "post-Communist" Kwasniewski. Even Jacek Kuron, himself attacked as "postCommunist" by the non-liberal sections of the right and by most of the ecclesiastic hierarchy, has publicly supported this public position of the bishops. These three forces have recently enabled the incumbent, Lech Walesa, to regain second place in the polls, with sufficient support to beat Kwasniewski in the second round 12 International Viewpoint n° 271 - November 1995
The liberal current is the only part of the represen to have an irate and radical radical right continue refusing to ally themselves with the Free Union against the SaRP and the SLD. But despite its dispersal, the right remains a powertul and menacing torce. After all, there is also the "ecclesiastical party" — the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the "military party" - the general staff and the military hierarchy, and the "trade union party" - made up of the hierarchy of the Solidarity trade unions. THE ECCLESIASTICS want to install a confessional state in Poland. The military want to support Walesa, and to ensure that the military bureaucracy can actively participate in political power. And the Solidarity leadership supports a confessional state and a corporatist regime. Solidarity President Marian Krzaklewski has threatened to call for a Polish re-make of the "march on Rome". Solidarity is still a workers' union, but its leadership is completely in the hands of the right and the far right. The union continues to mobilise part of the working class, in particular the mining proletariat of Silesia. The union's slogans mix justified workers' demands and extremely reactionary demands. The ideological workshops of Solidarity have concocted a "synthesis" of revolutionary syndicalism and integral nationalism, similar in many respects to the ideology of the French and Italian workers' movements at the beginning of the century. The most extreme current in Solidarity, openly anti-semitic, is led by Zygmunt Wrzodak, and has its stronghold in the Ursus tractor factory in Warsaw. It was trade unionists from Ursus who used an anti-government demonstration this June to call for sending the ministers to the gas chambers. Warsaw Regional President of Solidarity, Maciej Jankowski, has condemned the "fascist methods" of his colleagues at Ursus. But he himself insists that, if Kwasniewski becomes president, his union will unleash "a revolution, which will not be of the velvet kind [against] Communist power". The Catholic clergy certainly shares the sentiments of father Henryk Jankowski, the pro-Solidarity priest whose antisemitic diatribe met with enthusiastic applause at the recent Solidarity congress. The audience that day included Lech Walesa. FIGHTING THE RIGHT in Poland today means preventing the installation of a right-wing dictatorship. The restoration of capitalism cannot be taken all the way without a radical, necessarily violent change in the balance of social forces, and a transformation of the structures of society. Political democracy, even the bourgeois type, is incompatible with the consolidation of the process of restoration. In the best case, an electoral victory for the left will slow the growth of this tendency. But it will not reverse it, since this left is itself in favour of the restoration of capitalism. There is an urgent need for an anti-capitalist alternative. But there is no sign of such an alternative on the horizon. *
Greece