A Turbulent Initiation for Mazowiecki Amid Political, Religious Controversies

At long last, Poland has a government. The parliamentary crisis, which had assumed almost Italian proportions, has finally been resolved with a clear-cut Solidarity victory. Meanwhile, in the offices of the Communist caretaker government, officials are busy shredding documents. The transition is under way.

The new Catholic prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, 62, a lawyer, is not only a prestigious social thinker but also an astute negotiator. During the Round Table talks between the Communists and Solidarity this spring, Mazowiecki won Solidarity’s renewed legitimacy with only minor changes in its status--a ringing success few had believed possible.

His major handicap is that he has never headed a staff of more than a dozen; now he is charged with running the government. Along with being a neophyte in bureaucracy, the new prime minister faces some monumental problems.

One of them emerged Aug. 26, when the Catholic Church stirred controversy with anti-Semitic remarks by Cardinal Jozef Glemp. The cardinal’s statement, regarding Jewish opposition to a Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, has been widely popular at home, but has caused sizable political and economic damage for Poland abroad. Mazowiecki, who has a long record of personal integrity and of opposition to official anti-Semitism, cannot afford to confront the church on the issue: He needs all the social and institutional support he can get.

The same is not true of liberal elements within the opposition, who feel threatened by the possibility of a xenophobic and clerical turn in the life of the country. Solidarity’s newspaper published a highly critical editorial the day after Glemp’s homily. Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, sensing the danger, covertly criticized Glemp, but his statement was not reported by the Polish media.

In attempting to govern, Mazowiecki faces a double threat. On the one hand, the opposition has had no opportunity to develop skills in administration, and its members are ill-prepared for the job. A Solidarity columnist recently quipped that Mazowiecki’s Cabinet will be “government by the opposition.”

On the other hand, the Communists, though defeated, are by no means out: Their nomenklatura, a Mafia-like system of political nominees, 900,000 strong, is the administration, and no viable massive replacements are in sight. What is more, the constitution gives the president top authority in matters of defense, security and foreign policy, which means that the party, whatever the government, will continue to run the armed forces and the police.

But the party has lost one crucial battle. The Foreign Ministry goes, against all expectations, into non-Communist hands. The new appointee is an academic who is strongly pro-Solidarity: Krzysztof Skubiszewski, an expert on international law from the University of Poznan who has been a foreign-affairs adviser to Cardinal Glemp. He is an expert on Germany, a fact that points to the new government’s priorities in foreign affairs. His appointment is a sure sign of Communist weakness and is bound to irritate Prague and East Berlin. It is small consolation that two other ministries--Transportation, important for Soviet strategic interests, and International Ecomomic Cooperation--that is, relations with Comecon, the Communist trading bloc--remain safely in Communist hands.

Solidarity also has problems with its new allies, the Peasant and Democratic parties. To save their political necks, the two parties have broken their decades-long association with the Communists and formed a new coalition with Solidarity.

The Peasant Party, Solidarity’s major ally, demanded six ministerial posts, arguing that the Communists had offered them as much, but settled for four: Agriculture, Environmental Protection, Health and Justice. The party is split, however, between its old-time nomenklatura and its reform-minded Parliamentary Club. Aleksander Bentkowski, president of the club, is slated to be minister of justice, much to the disgust of Solidarity human-rights activists who wanted the job for one of their number. The current minister of agriculture and vice prime minister, nomenklatura representative Kazimierz Olesiak, will lose his job to a respected Peasant Party professor.

The Democrats also got a vice prime minister’s post and two minor ministries. Solidarity takes the rest. All the economic ministries are filled by partisans of a free market. This is true in particular of Tadeusz Syryjczyk, the new minister of industry, who is a Solidarity activist turned private entrepreneur. Of the ministers drawn from the ranks of the erstwhile opposition, only Jacek Kuron, the new minister of labor, represents the traditional Solidarity ethos.

The Sejm, or lower house of Parliament, meets next Tuesday to act on Mazowiecki’s nominations, following parliamentary hearings over the weekend.

The country’s immediate problems, however, are economic, not political. Mazowiecki, in his acceptance speech, stressed that the economy will be his main priority, and that the elaboration of the program of reforms to be submitted to the International Monetary Fund tops the list.

Inflation, nearing an annual rate of 200%, is the main enemy. A plan advanced by Harvard Prof. Jeffrey Sachs is being discussed in Solidarity circles. Sachs stresses the success it has had in rescuing the Bolivian economy, where inflation fell from 10,000% annually in 1985 to 20% in the past year. But Poland is not Bolivia: There is no substantial private sector or skilled managerial class. Precious few foreign businessmen will want to invest in a country run by a trade union.

And the future behavior of that trade union--and of society at-large--is anybody’s guess. The national leadership of Solidarity has launched an appeal to end all strikes, but was undercut by the powerful leader of the union in the Gdansk region, Bogdan Borusewicz, who announced that “Solidarity will continue to organize strikes, if need be.” The Communist union OPZZ (the Polish initials for All-Polish Trade Union Agreement), still more powerful than Solidarity, has refused to appeal for a strike moratorium. OPZZ recently denounced the Communist Party, which it no longer considers “a guarantor of workers’ interests.” The union announced its intention to establish ties with the anti-Walesa opposition. This could lead to the creation of a dangerous and disruptive force.

Despite recent big price hikes, basic goods--from sugar to meat to matches--are simply unavailable on the market, and people are desperate. On the black market the dollar is worth more than 12,000 zloties, double what it was less than six months ago; the average Polish monthly paycheck is about 120,000 zloties. Automatic indexing of salaries to cost-of-living increases, negotiated at the Round Table, has yet to take effect in practice.

Notwithstanding the country’s problems, the fact remains that the root cause of Poland’s predicament--the Communist stranglehold on power--has been attacked, if not yet eliminated. For all the new problems that arise, the country, for the first time in its recent history, has grounds for hope.