Won’t Shrink From Hard Choices, Polish Leader Says

Parliament overwhelmingly approved entrepreneur Jan Krzysztof Bielecki as the new prime minister today after he pledged to make the unpopular decisions necessary to re-create former Communist Poland as “a normal country.”

The vote was 276 to 58 with 52 abstentions.

President Lech Walesa, who proposed Bielecki for the post last week, sat in the president’s chair overlooking the Parliament floor for the first time since the ex-Solidarity leader was sworn in as Poland’s first popularly elected head of state on Dec. 22.

Bielecki, 39, a deputy in the lower house of Parliament, or Sejm, started a private business consulting firm employing Solidarity trade union activists thrown out of work by the Communist regime.

He is head of the Liberal-Democratic Congress, a small political party devoted to developing private enterprise.

Bielecki replaces Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who became the East Bloc’s first non-Communist government leader in August, 1989, after Solidarity trounced the Communists in partially free elections two months earlier.

Mazowiecki announced his resignation after finishing behind Walesa and emigre businessman Stanislaw Tyminski in the first round of the presidential election on Nov. 25.

Bielecki will serve until parliamentary elections, expected next year. He was expected to present a 22-page government program to Parliament on Saturday and nominate his Cabinet.

“My government will keep in mind the balance sheet of successes and failures of our predecessors,” Bielecki told Parliament before the vote. “That is why we want to be a government of continuation as well as breakthrough.”

Bielecki said a market-driven economy is the proven “foundation of freedom.”

“I want us to make further steps taking Poland away from the totalitarian legacy,” he said.

But he noted that the economic reforms will include rising prices, unemployment and uncertainty toward the goal of vastly improved consumer supplies and new opportunities.