Solidarity Offers Reprieve for Regime’s Election Loss

The Solidarity trade union, flushed with its election victory over Poland’s ruling Communist coalition, said Tuesday that it is willing to allow the government to restore or replace a special list of its candidates sent down to defeat by an angry electorate.

But the union leadership stood firm on its refusal to enter into a coalition government with the Communists, arguing that Solidarity had competed in national elections as an opposition party and could not surrender that role.

The official tallies from Sunday’s voting were still not completed, but the government and a spokesman for the Communist Party coalition acknowledged that their ticket had been overwhelmingly beaten by Solidarity-backed candidates for the Sejm, or Parliament, and a newly constituted Senate.

Under an agreement reached by the government and Solidarity in April, the Communist coalition was supposed to control 65%, or 299 seats, of the 460-member Sejm, with 35% of the seats open to be contested by opposition candidates. In the Senate, all 100 seats were open to competitors from all sides.

It seems likely that Solidarity will win more than 90, and perhaps all 100, of the seats in the Senate, and about 150 of the 161 seats open to its candidates in the Sejm.

Those results, although a bigger landslide that even Solidarity’s most avid supporters predicted, cannot be viewed as an upset. But the failure of the government’s so-called national list of 35 unopposed candidates, most of them major party and government figures, was a genuine shock to the authorities.

The embarrassment from the government and Communist Party side was evident, as the party Politburo met in an extra-long session and the government’s press spokesman evaded key questions about the government’s next step.

Among those on the national list were Premier Mieczyslaw Rakowski, Minister of Internal Affairs Czeslaw Kiszczak and veteran Politburo member Jozef Czyrek, who was among those who had pushed through the idea of holding talks with Solidarity. Although all were running without competition, they had to be approved by 50% of the voters in order to win election to the Parliament. Unofficial returns, so far not disputed by the government, indicate that all 35 had been rejected.

The key issue now, for Solidarity as much as for the government, is how to replace the rejected 35 officials so that the balance agreed upon earlier can be achieved.

While the embarrassment is most acute for the Communist side, it is also a sticky issue for Solidarity, which had counted on working with those officials--most of them regarded as the regime’s most reform-oriented liberals--in the new national assembly.

“This problem can be solved according to the law,” Bronislaw Geremek, Solidarity’s key strategist, said Tuesday. “This means we are ready to accept any solution which will conform to the round-table agreement. This means a (Communist) coalition participation in the Sejm of 65%.”

Repeatedly pressed by reporters to suggest a formula by which the government might replace the 35 candidates, Geremek replied: “It’s not our problem.”

Pressed on the same issue, deputy government press spokesman Zbyslaw Rakowski answered, “It is being discussed,” but he would not elaborate.

Rakowski did question whether the election results really represented the “will of the people.”

“The decisions of the individual voters were guided above all by emotions,” he noted.

Bogdan Borusewicz, a Solidarity leader in the port of Gdansk, cautioned Poles against overconfidence.

“We have to remember that police, army and Communist propaganda remain in the same hands,” he said.

And Solidarity adviser Adam Michnik noted that the Soviet Union and China, both run by apparently reform-minded regimes, recently had resorted to violence when people demanded too much freedom. He cited the deadly military crackdown in Beijing as well as the use of chemical gas against demonstrators in the Soviet republic of Georgia earlier this year.

“The firing at people and death victims . . . indicated what kind of dangers we should avoid,” he said.

Solidarity spokesman Janusz Onyskiewicz acknowledged that some of the union’s supporters would be angry with any solution that allowed the national list candidates to be chosen for Parliament after their clear rejection by the voters.

“But it should be noted,” he said, “that people who voted for Solidarity voted for the Solidarity platform, and that platform included our pledge to the round-table agreement.”

Onyskiewicz admitted that the union is worried by the election’s overwhelming outcome.

“It is too good a result for us,” he said. “What worries us is that we counted on our reform program to be negotiated in Parliament. But if the leading members of the government side from the round-table talks are not in Parliament, we may be forced to conduct our negotiations outside.”

Onyskiewicz’s concern is a recognition of the divisions inside the ruling party, where hard-liners and the party’s vast nomenclatura apparatus oppose the kind of political and economic reforms engineered by the present leadership. The fear, among both the opposition forces and the party liberals, is that the humiliating defeat in an open election could lead to a party backlash.

Thus, as Onyskiewicz suggested, Solidarity would prefer that the government find some face-saving way of slipping the national list officials into the Sejm, rather than risk having to deal with another, more stubborn lineup of opponents.

Political observers noted that it is in the interests of both Solidarity and the government to solve the national list issue as gracefully as possible to avoid a paralyzing deadlock in the new national assembly, where some solutions must be found for Poland’s ever-mounting economic problems.

Even though Solidarity refuses to join the government at the ministerial level, both sides will be forced to cooperate in the national assembly, where a vote of the Solidarity-controlled Senate can veto legislation passed by the Sejm.

Such a veto can be overridden by a two-thirds majority of the Sejm. But even with a 65% majority in the Sejm, the Communist Party and its allies would need at least eight Solidarity votes in the Sejm to override a Senate veto.