Polish Party Names Choice for Premier : Interior Minister Kiszczak Will Be Formally Nominated Today

Interior Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak, one of the Polish Communist Party’s leading reformers, has been chosen as the party’s nominee for premier, it was announced Monday.

Gen. Kiszczak, 63, a career military officer and head of the Polish police apparatus, is to be formally nominated today by President Wojciech Jaruzelski in a speech to the Sejm, or lower house of the National Assembly, which is then expected to ratify the choice.

The announcement came as the government prepared to lift price controls, beginning today, on most major food items. And while lawmakers argued over a plan to help workers keep up with galloping inflation, long lines formed at food stores as consumers queued up to buy out depleted supplies remaining on the shelves.

Solidarity’s parliamentary leader, Bronislaw Geremek, said the labor movement’s deputies either would abstain or vote against Kiszczak, but if the Communist coalition holds together Kiszczak should have no trouble winning the Sejm’s approval. The Communists, along with their coalition partners, hold a 299-161 majority over Solidarity in the Sejm.

Although Solidarity feels uncomfortable about openly supporting Kiszczak, many of the labor union movement’s leading members are known to hold him in higher regard than most of the other ranking Communist officials.

It was Kiszczak who appeared on television last August to propose the series of talks that ended with the so-called “round-table” accords in April.

Kiszczak went on to lead the government side in those negotiations, which resulted in Solidarity’s reinstatement as a legal labor union after a seven-year ban. The talks also led to the June elections in which Solidarity candidates swept the Senate and all the seats open to it in the Sejm.

Although he wore his Polish army uniform for that August television announcement, his many subsequent appearances have shown him wearing a smartly cut civilian suit, a ready smile and a genial manner as he bantered with Solidarity activists, whose arrests he had once ordered during the martial-law crackdown of 1981.

In the course of the negotiations, Kiszczak appeared to have struck a genuine rapport with some Solidarity members, including Lech Walesa, who last month went so far as to suggest Kiszczak as a candidate for president, the post now held by Jaruzelski.

Indeed, the selection of Kiszczak officially sets into place essentially the same set of men who have been guiding Poland’s reforms for the last year.

During the round-table discussions, when subordinates deadlocked over details, it was usually a meeting among Kiszczak, Walesa and their key aides that broke through the logjam. Now, with Solidarity in the National Assembly and Kiszczak about to be chosen premier, the group has been institutionalized in the system.

Kiszczak’s selection also ends weeks of public posturing over whether Solidarity should be allowed, or even aspire, to put together the new Polish government. Last week, Jaruzelski told a Solidarity deputy that a Solidarity government was impossible because it would be too disturbing to Poland’s neighbors--the Soviet Union, East Germany and Czechoslovakia. The settlement of the issue will be a relief to some Solidarity moderates, especially Geremek, who has argued that Solidarity is not yet ready to run a government.

Kiszczak told reporters that he was not sure how long it would take him to form a government.

“It all depends on how much time I am given,” he said. “It is not an easy task.”

At the same time, the argument over the government’s “marketization” plan for food was providing an illustration of Kiszczak’s looming problems. The marketization plan was designed by outgoing Premier Mieczyslaw Rakowski, who was named Communist Party leader Saturday, and it has taken heavy flak from both Communist and opposition forces.

While supporting the idea of a market-driven economy, Solidarity has argued that in the food industry, it should be approached gradually. Solidarity has been joined by some leading Communist figures, including Wladislaw Baka, who resigned as head of the Central Committee’s economic commission, in arguing that the marketization plan will add more fuel to inflation.

The argument in the Sejm on Monday centered on the details of an “indexation” plan that would raise salaries to keep pace with rising prices. Most of the Communist coalition favors a plan that would base the calculations on wage levels predating recent wage increases following a round of wildcat strikes in May and June. Solidarity is arguing in favor of the more generous alternative: basing the calculations on current wages.

Rakowski, answering the heavy criticism of the marketization plan, has asserted that the shortages in the food market stem primarily from the fact that farmers are not paid enough for their produce, particularly meat, and that supplies will reappear when prices go up.