Poles OK New Elections for 33 Vacant Parliament Seats : This Time, Communists Are Sure to Win; Solidarity May Take Small Role in Regime

Solidarity and a team of negotiators for the Polish government have decided to hold new elections to fill 33 vacant seats in Parliament created when all but two names on a special list of unopposed Communist candidates were rejected by voters in last Sunday’s elections.

And Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, in his first news conference since the election, said Friday that some members of the Solidarity “team” might join the Communist-dominated government. But he insisted that Solidarity will continue to resist the government’s call to join in a coalition government.

“We will not disturb the government,” Walesa said in the port city of Gdansk, the Reuters news agency reported. “But we will push very hard for reforms.”

The agreement to fill the 33 vacancies, reached late Thursday by Walesa and the interior minister, Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak, resolves a delicate problem for both sides and, in blunt terms, rigs an election that the Communists had already lost.

The rejection of all but two names on a so-called “national list” of unopposed candidates had thrown into disarray the balance arrived at earlier by Solidarity and the government. This gave 65% of the seats in the Parliament, or Sejm, to the Communist-led coalition and left the other 35% to competitive challenge among the opposition led by Solidarity.

The elections were a disaster for the Communists and a triumph for Solidarity, although the preelection agreement guarantees the Communist coalition an edge in the balance of power between the new national assembly’s two chambers, the Sejm and the Senate.

In the first round of the elections, Solidarity won outright 252 of the 261 seats for which it was eligible to compete--92 of 100 in the newly revived Senate and 160 in the Sejm. Solidarity seems likely to capture the remaining Senate seats and its last seat in the Sejm in the runoff elections June 18.

The “national list” candidates, although they ran unopposed in the first round, lost because a provision in the electoral law, overlooked until it was too late to change it, required that they win at least 50% of the vote to be elected. Polish voters, delighted at the chance to strike the country’s leading Communist establishment figures off the ballot, voted against them, even though Solidarity said, somewhat belatedly, that it wanted the “national list” candidates in the Sejm.

The list included such prominent figures as Premier Mieczyslaw F. Rakowski, Kiszczak and six other members of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo.

For the second round of voting, Solidarity and the government decided to evade the earlier problem by pairing the “national list” candidates with another Communist opponent--straw men, in effect. In this way, the Communists are sure that someone will be elected to fill their portion of seats in the Sejm.

One of the defeated “national list” candidates, official union chief Alfred Miodowicz, regarded as a hard-liner and persistent opponent of Solidarity, announced Friday that he will not run again.

On the whole, however, the key figures on the list--Kiszczak, Politburo member Stanislaw Ciosek and economic chief Wladislaw Baka--are likely to remain, with Solidarity’s backing.