Split in Solidarity Settles Into Two Camps : Poland: Scene is being set for a presidential showdown between Walesa and Prime Minister Mazowiecki.

The scene is being set in Poland for an election showdown between Solidarity union leader Lech Walesa and Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, as the split in the former Communist opposition movement settles into two broad camps.

Neither Walesa nor Mazowiecki has reached the stage of declaring himself a candidate for the presidency, a post now held by Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the former Communist Party leader whose term has five more years to run.

But figures on both sides of the Solidarity split are pushing for elections this fall, and Jaruzelski has hinted that he will readily step aside should Parliament move for early parliamentary and presidential elections.

The latest grouping to emerge is the Democratic Action group, known by its Polish acronym ROAD. Led by Zbigniew Bujak and Wladislaw Frasyniuk, heroes of Solidarity’s underground years, it attracted 1,000 charter members to a meeting Saturday to officially launch itself as a political party. ROAD has thrown its considerable weight behind Mazowiecki and his year-old government.

On the other side is the Center Agreement, which is pushing Walesa for the presidency. The party’s leading organizer is Lech Kaczynski, a longtime Walesa aide and one of his key political operatives.

Efforts to bridge the gap between Walesa and Mazowiecki, including a session between the two principals, failed to resolve differences between the camps. So, the liberals of the Democratic Action group pressed ahead with their organizational plans, unified by the goal of blocking Walesa’s drive for the presidency.

Democratic Action’s founders are trying to avoid labels of “left” or “right,” arguing that they make little sense in a country finding its way through a thicket of post-Communist economic and political changes. Nevertheless, most political observers regard the grouping as liberal.

“We are organizing around a certain vision of Poland, not for or against anyone,” Frasyniuk said.

Despite that disclaimer, Frasyniuk, Bujak and other activists in the group are clearly opposed to a Walesa presidency.

“Walesa has had a great role in Poland,” said Adam Michnik, the editor of Solidarity’s daily newspaper and a longtime opposition activist.

“He can have a great role in the future as well, when he considers himself a citizen and not a god,” Michnik went on. “He is my friend, and I say this from friendship, not from maliciousness. He has a special role in Poland, but he is not a baby whose rules and desires and admonitions should automatically be satisfied.”

“There is polarization taking place inside Solidarity,” Bujak told delegates at the meeting Saturday. “This does not have to be bad. A democratic country is a country of different proposals. We will have to forget about the otherwise comfortable structure in which the picture was black and white--just us against them.”

Walesa was the virtually undisputed head of Solidarity, the East Bloc’s first free trade union, from its inception in 1980 through its election victory over the Communists last year. It was Walesa who handpicked Mazowiecki, a longtime Solidarity adviser, as the first non-Communist prime minister in postwar Eastern Europe.

Under the bargain struck with the Communists, the presidency went to Jaruzelski, and Walesa, who sought no role in the day-to-day government, returned to his union headquarters in Gdansk.

“Since then,” said Janusz Onyskiewicz, formerly the Solidarity spokesman and now a deputy defense minister, “Walesa has been out of the loop, but he has been out of it by his own choosing.

“Now, the situation has changed. People in the government have their own base, their own constituencies. They see no reason why they should consult with Walesa. If something goes wrong, they will take the blame for it, not Walesa. So, they are much more independent.”

In recent months, isolated from the core group of activists who once advised him and who are now busy in the government or Parliament, Walesa has sniped at Mazowiecki’s administration, accusing it of moving too slowly to reform Poland’s political system and to root out the Communist apparatchiks still at work throughout government institutions.

Andrzej Malachowski, a member of the Democratic Action group, acknowledges some government mistakes.

“The government has been slow to make changes in some areas--the diplomatic service, the justice and interior ministries,” he said. “Sometimes, it seems to some people that certain areas have been turned over to incompetent people. All of this is deepened by the fact that there are people in society who naturally think of revenge, people who suffered at the hands of the Communists.

“So it is a dangerous game Walesa is playing now, fighting for power. There is a danger that he will build around him a party of the dissatisfied. Although I think he is a decent man himself, he may be inviting the establishment of an authoritarian movement in Europe, and this would be bad.”

Democratic Action supporters are pointing to the sharp rhetoric of the Center Agreement as an expression of what they see as a dangerously nationalistic tendency in the group, for which they blame not Walesa but his most vocal supporters.

“The Center group,” Malachowski said, “says that those who are opposed to it were former (Communist) Party members. Therefore, they awake the old myths, even prewar myths, that the Jews, the Freemasons and Communists are to blame for everything.”

“Sometimes,” Michnik said, “Walesa has spoken wisely and responsibly. But one thing that bothers me is a populist rhetoric in his speech that makes him a banner for all these disaffected people.” It is not that Walesa has actively sought the disaffected, Michnik said, but rather that they have rallied around him.