Polish Communists to Offer New Election Slate

Poland’s Council of State announced Monday that a new list of candidates will be submitted in a special slate to replace 33 government and Communist Party officials who were rejected by voters in parliamentary elections June 4.

Among the 33 defeated candidates on the government’s “national list” was Premier Mieczyslaw F. Rakowski and seven other members of the party’s ruling Politburo.

Rakowski, in a statement issued after the decree by the Council of State, did not rule out continuing as head of the government but said that to ensure that “the will of the electorate would not be offended,” he will not seek election.

Theoretically, Rakowski could continue as premier, since Polish law does not require the leader of the government to be a member of Parliament.

“I am not withdrawing from public life,” Rakowski said. “On the contrary, with all my might I will serve my nation in any posts my party and constitutional authorities of the state entrust to me and which I consider possible to accept.”

The decision by the Council of State, an executive body of the government that acts in place of the Parliament when that assembly is not in session, was a surprise.

The Solidarity opposition forces, which won 160 of the 161 seats in the Parliament and 92 of 100 seats in the Senate in the first round of the elections, had hoped that the rejected candidates of the “national list” might be elected in the second round of the voting Sunday.

Reform-Minded Liberals

The national list was composed mostly of government officials and reform-minded party liberals with whom Solidarity had been dealing for much of the last year. This group, leading an internal fight against Communist hard-liners, engineered the discussions in April that led to re-legalization of Solidarity and the elections, Poland’s freest in more than 40 years.

The Solidarity leadership, in meetings with the government side last week, agreed that it had no objections to the government resubmitting the names to the electorate, and, in effect, agreed to endorse them.

Although Rakowski and the other “national list” candidates ran unopposed in the first round, the election law required that they receive at least half of the votes to win election. Only two on a list of 35 made the required 50%.

The failure of the 33 candidates created vacancies in the Sejm, or Parliament, on the Communist side. According to a pre-election agreement, the Communists and their coalition partners were supposed to have 65% of the Sejm and the Solidarity-led opposition 35%.

The Council of State said that the 33 vacant seats will have to be contested by 66 candidates, thereby ensuring that there will be a winner for each seat. Since the seats are all apportioned to the Communist side, all the candidates will be chosen by the party’s coalition.