Polish Party OKs Plans to Share Power

The Polish Communist Party crossed what it called a historic threshold Friday, approving plans to transform the country’s political system and end the party’s 45-year monopoly on power.

At a brief meeting, the 230-member Central Committee, the party’s top policy-making body, passed a resolution endorsing sweeping political reforms drafted in seven weeks of talks between the government and the opposition. It also announced plans for a convention in May to prepare for new democratic elections.

Agreements at the talks so far include legalization of the banned Solidarity union, liberalization of the right of association, electoral rules allowing the opposition into Parliament and creation of a democratically elected Senate, or upper house, and elected presidency.

Specifically approving the outcome of the talks, which are due to end next week, the resolution said: “The Central Committee accepted the agreements reached so far at the round-table (talks) over the major issues of speeding up and deepening the reforms.”

The party said the changes approved Friday were in line with guidelines the Central Committee issued in January for creation of “a citizen’s society and a state based on socialist parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.”

New Spokesman

The party leadership also named a spokesman who said he would try to shed more light on the party’s inner workings, and it announced an internal reorganization in which the closed party administrative departments will be replaced by commissions open to participation by non-party members.

The new party spokesman, Jan Bisztyga, said the resolution meant Poland was crossing a historic threshold on the road to revolutionary change.

The talks are deadlocked over the sharing of power between the Senate and the presidency--a post that Communist leader Wojciech Jaruzelski is expected to assume.

Jaruzelski said the May 4-5 party conference should confirm the party’s will “to carry out a program of broad political and socioeconomic reforms, and have a mobilizing influence . . . on party members.”

“In a word, it must play the role of our great election convention,” he said.

If the tentative agreement with the opposition is ratified, then for the first time in postwar Poland, Communist candidates would face direct electoral competition from opposition candidates for seats in the newly created Senate.

Bisztyga, a party activist who described himself as “a politician, not a clerk,” told state TV that he is ready to “present more openly to the society in the mass media everything concerning party activities.”