Polish Leader Calls Meeting to End Crisis : Solidarity Willing to Form Government With Communists

President Wojciech Jaruzelski called today for an urgent meeting to end Poland’s political deadlock, and the Solidarity opposition said it was ready to form a government with Communist participation.

Jaruzelski said he wanted all Poland’s main political groups to meet as soon as possible and break the crisis that flared Monday when Prime Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak gave up his efforts to create a Communist-led administration.

Solidarity leader Lech Walesa softened his previous terms for entering a coalition government by saying the opposition would accept a deal that allowed the Communist Party to keep the defense and interior ministries.

Rising Concern in Moscow

“The most important ministries which are the base of the physical continuity of the state should stay in the hands of the Communist Party,” Walesa told reporters at his home in the Baltic port of Gdansk.

Walesa’s statement sought to ease rising concern in Moscow over Poland’s crisis. The Soviet newspaper Pravda, in its first attack on Walesa in the current turmoil, criticized him Monday for refusing to join a Communist-led government.

Walesa said Solidarity had no intention of taking Poland out of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact military alliance. He said the opposition wanted to run economic ministries in order to implement reforms of which the Communists were incapable.

Kiszczak, the first Eastern European Communist leader to declare that he could not form a government, said Monday he was handing the task to Roman Malinowski, leader of the United Peasants’ Party.

Obedient Allies

The UPP and the Democratic Party are two small parties that have been obedient allies of the Communists since the 1940s. In the current climate of rapid reform, they have made clear they want a more independent role.

Walesa called last week for a wholly non-Communist government uniting Solidarity with the UPP and the Democratic Party. But Solidarity sources said the union’s main concern had been to stop Kiszczak from installing his own team in office.

Kiszczak was unacceptable to Solidarity because, as a former interior minister, he was Jaruzelski’s right-hand man in 1981 when the authorities imposed martial law and interned thousands of union activists.

Under the deal being hammered out by Solidarity and the non-Communist parties, the opposition would nominate a prime minister and the UPP would have the foreign ministry, with the Communists taking care of Polish-Soviet security affairs.

Important Power Brokers

The UPP and the Democratic Party have become important power brokers because they have 22% of Parliament’s seats. Neither the Communists, with 38%, nor Solidarity, with 35%, can form a majority without their support.

Walesa said he did not want to become prime minister. But “if society wants it, I must do it. I would prefer to have someone else,” he said.

Speaking to reporters, Walesa named Tadeusz Fiszbach, a Communist reformer who is deputy speaker in Parliament, as one party leader whom Solidarity could accept as a partner in government.

Solidarity and other non-Communist politicians said the crisis looked certain to continue because Malinowski, a deputy prime minister under martial law, was scarcely more acceptable to the opposition than Kiszczak.