Free Elections for Poland?

“I am old enough to have seen democratic elections. I want to see them again.” With those plaintive but hopeful words, opposition leader Bronislaw Geremek has greeted the tentative understanding reached with Poland’s Communist Party to create a new national two-house legislature, many of whose members would be freely elected. Not since 1946 have anything like free elections been permitted in Poland; only a minority of the population can remember a time when a choice among parties and candidates was allowed. A majority of Poles probably long ago gave up any expectation such a time would come again. Now that prospect seems tantalizingly close to realization. The first democratic national elections in the Communist bloc could come as early as June 4.

All this depends on what finally emerges from the negotiations that have been going on since Feb. 6 about what political changes should take place in Poland. So far, tentative agreement has been reached to restore the banned trade union Solidarity, the farmers’ union and the Independent Students’ Assn. Agreement also has been reached to establish a president with strong powers, who would be chosen by a majority of both chambers of parliament. Solidarity officials have already all but conceded the presidency to Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, who has ruled Poland since 1981. The entire package of changes must be adopted before any one of them can take effect.

What the opposition is now pushing for is free elections at the local level, along with access by non-Communist elements to the mass media and freedom for them to create independent associations. Acceptance by the regime of these steps, which is by no means assured, would mark an unprecedented leap forward.

What the reforms that have so far been provisionally agreed to indicate is how desperate the regime has become as it faces the challenges of a sick and steadily weakening economy and an increasingly hostile and restive population. In an effort to mobilize popular support, if not behind its leaders then at least behind its efforts at national revival, Poland’s Communist Party seems prepared to accept a diminution of its authoritarian powers that would effectively give the country the broadest-based government in the Communist bloc. What may be developing is a degree of change that is nothing short of revolutionary in its implications, for Poland certainly, and perhaps for other Eastern Europe countries as well.