Pundits were predicting a gloves-off, bloody nose brawl between the reigning ex-communists and the church-backed Solidarity movement.
Elections in post-communist Poland have always been rough-and-tumble affairs and there was no reason to think it would be any different this time around.
But to the surprise and relief of most Poles, the run-up to Sunday’s parliamentary election has been sedate, especially in light of the fact that the two main rivals are neck and neck.
The Democratic Left Alliance, the coalition of reformed communists currently in power, is being challenged by Solidarity Election Action, a grouping of about 30 right-wing parties under the umbrella of the famous trade union.
In past elections, the hot-button issues have been abortion, the role of the powerful Roman Catholic Church, and–above all–whose side you were on in December 1981 when martial law was declared.
This time around, however, the focus has been on the economy, taxes, health care, rising crime and local government reform. Poland is experiencing its first “normal” election, according to Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski, head of the Institute of Political Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences.
“The main political rivals are fighting not for their hard-core ideological constituency, but for the middle. They learned from previous campaigns that you don’t get anywhere by threatening people with imaginary calamities.”
Jan Olszewski, the former prime minister who heads his own right-wing nationalist party, suggested a linkage to the floods that devastated large swaths of southwest Poland this summer.
“The floods sobered people,” he said. “They didn’t want to hear emotional debates of the past.”
Eleven parties are contesting the election but only six or seven are given a serious chance of crossing the 5 percent threshold needed to enter parliament.
The absence of over-heated rhetoric and burning issues has not made it any easier for voters to make up their minds.
Agnieszka Klimkiewicz, 27, says she definitely won’t vote for Solidarity or any of the other right-wing parties, but she can’t muster much enthusiasm for the ex-communists either.
“No one likes the old communists, but I really don’t like the way Solidarity and the other parties on the Right are manipulated by the church,” she said.
Having been badly burned in the 1995 presidential elections when larger-than-life incumbent Lech Walesa was defeated by the reformed communist Aleksander Kwasniewski, Poland’s Roman Catholic Church hierarchy has tried to lower its profile in politics. Its efforts haven’t been entirely successful.
Archbishop Zbigniew Kraszewski, patron of Polish war veterans, appeared at a Solidarity rally last week. “Communism is cancer,” he warned. “You don’t stroke cancer. You cut it out.”
Solidarity makes no secret of the fact that it sees itself as the official “Catholic” party. It held its kick-off rally at Czestochowa, Poland’s most important religious site.
The revamped Solidarity party is the creation of Marian Krzaklewski, the photogenic successor to the frumpy Walesa. It is a none-too-steady alliance of more than 30 parties united only in their mistrust of ex-communists. On most other issues, Krzaklewski, 48, has held the alliance together with a gift for glib ambiguity.
This new incarnation of Solidarity is a far cry from the mass movement that toppled Poland’s communist regime in 1989.
Back then, Solidarity claimed 11 million members–nearly a quarter of the population. But once in power, the remarkable unity quickly crumbled.
The parliamentary election in 1993 was a disaster. A half dozen post-Solidarity parties collected more than 50 percent of the popular vote, but only three managed to get past the 5 percent barrier. That gave them only 131 of the 460 seats in the Sejm and put the ex-communists back in power.
But the resurrection of the reformed communists did not produce the return to the bad old days predicted by Walesa and feared by many.
The economy has grown a robust 6 percent a year under the stewardship of the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD). A thriving middle class has emerged. The Kwasniewski-led government courted and received an invitation to join NATO.
The SLD’s strongest election pitch is that Solidarity–prone to suicidal infighting–might muck up a good thing. They received a strong endorsement from unexpected quarters when Moody’s, the American bond rating agency, said that a Solidarity victory could lead to “extremely unfavorable policy developments” while the SLD “has done nothing to slow economic reforms.”
It is an odd reversal of roles. The ex-communists are accused by Solidarity of being the party of “big capital” while the famous trade union is trying to reinvent itself as a right-wing, socially conservative political party.
The polls show Solidarity and SLD each with about 25 percent of the popular vote. That means the real intrigue will begin after the election, when the winner tries to cobble together a coalition.
The key center ground is occupied by the Freedom Union, a party of intellectuals–many of them former Solidarity stalwarts–headed by Leszek Balcerowicz, the former finance minister who is credited with the “shock therapy” that put Poland on the path to economic reform.
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