Solidarity Faction Elects Leadership Opposing Walesa Policies

Solidarity members opposed to Lech Walesa’s policies elected a seven-member leadership and warned Sunday that the recent food price increases in Poland could unleash “a new mass strike wave.”

The splinter Solidarity movement, which began meeting last year, maintains that Walesa runs the organization in a non-democratic way and refuses to hold elections.

The official Polish news agency PAP said Marian Jurczyk of Szczecin was elected head of the new Solidarity group calling itself “The Agreement on Democratic Elections in Solidarity” at a meeting Saturday in the Baltic port of Szczecin.

The Polish government lifted a ceiling on most of food prices last week in an effort to prompt farmers to produce more, triggering a cost increase of up to 500% on some items.

Walesa and his followers have reluctantly supported the need for price increases, although they said the government has taken them up too hastily and without adequate planning.

Boosts Triggered Strikes

The price increases and demand for compensatory wage increases triggered some strikes, although most were short-lived.

In a statement issued Sunday, the seven-member secretariat of the newly elected splinter group condemned the food price increases.

“The last price-income operation, called marketization of food economy, put broad masses of workers in a tragic situation “ the group said in a resolution. “Such a situation leads to justified defense actions and an understandable threat of a new mass strike wave.”

It called on the Polish National Assembly, particularly those members elected with Solidarity’s support, “to undertake immediate political action to change the economic policy currently conducted by Poland’s authorities.”

The resolution was not specific about the type of actions being considered.

Group’s Advisers

The group is advised by Wladyslaw Sila-Nowicki, formerly a Walesa associate who fell out of favor when he joined the government-sponsored Consultative Council, and by Wieslaw Chrzanowski, a lawyer and co-author of the Solidarity constitution in 1980.

Earlier Sunday in Gdansk, Walesa reiterated his opposition to the government of the new premier, Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak, and said he hopes no one from Solidarity will join it.

“This is not going to be a government we are waiting for,” Walesa told reporters after a Mass at St. Brygida’s Church. “I will appeal so that nobody (from Solidarity) goes into it. It is the monopoly of a single party, and a general’s monopoly.

“Society’s demands are obvious,” Walesa added. “It has been waiting for something else.”

Meanwhile, a strike of telephone and telex workers continued in the Legnica area in southwestern Poland. The telex network was not working and the telephone network of the state administration and the plants was disconnected, the PAP news agency said. Private telephones were still in operation.