Poland’s Nervous Victors

The first free plebiscite allowed in Eastern Europe in more than 40 years has produced a stunning repudiation of Poland’s ruling Communist Party. With official results still pending, candidates supported by Solidarity--the once-illegal trade union--have won at least 92 of the 100 seats in a newly resurrected Senate and 160 of the 161 seats they were permitted to contest in the 460-seat Assembly. At the same time the Communists and their allies failed to get a majority for even one of the 299 seats reserved for them in the Assembly; they will have to try again in a second round of voting on June 18. Even then, it’s possible that most voters will choose to reject rather than endorse their candidacies.

This week’s election was both a rout and a humiliation for the regime, the most emphatic proof yet that even after four decades of rule Poland’s Communist Party has failed to develop anything like a popular base of support. Deepening the embarrassment was the inability of all 35 candidates on an unopposed national list to get 50% of the vote needed for a parliamentary seat; among them was Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski. Candidates on the unopposed list are prohibited by law from running in the second round of voting, but Solidarity now says it won’t insist on enforcing that prohibition. The alternative might be a parliament that has fewer than the 460 deputies the new constitution calls for, raising the possibility that the election results could prove self-nullifying.

Solidarity meanwhile has refused again to take up the Communist Party’s invitation to form a coalition government. The rejection is understandable; the union has no interest in joining a coalition that would burden it with shared responsibility for Poland’s economic mess while still leaving it without real power to deal with the problem. But in the wake of an election that surprised even Solidarity--for tactical reasons it wanted reformers in the Communist ranks to be elected--union leader Lech Walesa is suggesting that talks with the regime about the country’s future should be reopened, the implication being that the voting results show that the time has come to talk about real power sharing.

Sunday’s election, with its carefully rigged apportionment of Assembly seats, was supposed to ensure that the levers of administrative power would remain in the Communist Party’s hands for some years to come. Now the party is faced with the prospect that it will have to give itsopponents a significant say in governing much sooner than anyone had thought likely or else see a painfully negotiated new political order collapse before it ever gets started. That would leave the party to deal on its own with the worsening economic crisis and an increasingly alienated populace.

The election was a smashing triumph for democracy. But whether that bodes good or ill for Poland’s immediate future remains very much undecided.