Poles Widely Split in Vote for Parliament : Election: Seven top parties share about 68% of the vote. Heirs of the now-defunct Communists get substantial support.

Polish voters delivered a split decision Sunday on the direction they want their government to take, dividing their votes for parliamentary candidates among a range of parties rooted in the Solidarity movement but also giving substantial support to parties allied with the now-defunct Communists.

Initial projections of the vote, in the first fully free parliamentary elections since 1947, indicated that the seven top parties split 68% of the vote almost evenly, leaving the rest of the ballots divided among a welter of minor parties.

The Democratic Union, an alliance of groups from the left wing of Solidarity headed by former Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, was projected by exit polls as the largest vote-getter, with 16%.

But surprisingly strong finishes were registered by the inheritors of the Communist Party mantle, with the Left Alliance headed by Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland (SDRP) running second and the Communists’ old parliamentary ally, the Peasants Party, in fifth place. The SDRP took 11% and the Peasants 10%.

Overall, parties that can be described as solid Communist opponents won at least 63.6% of the vote, so there is little likelihood that the outcome represents a resurgence of Communist ideology in Poland.

But the vote does reflect serious divisions in Polish society about the speed and harshness of Poland’s drive toward a market economy. The vote suggested that many voters would favor a slower pace and a government that is more obviously concerned with “social welfare” issues such as unemployment and assistance for pensioners.

The wide and generally even distribution of the vote between parties that would “go fast” on reform and those (the liberals) that would go slower indicates that there could be days of political jockeying ahead before a prime minister is named.

Jan Krzystof Bielecki, the current prime minister, suffered a setback in the vote as his Liberal Democratic Congress party finished in seventh place, with 9.7% of the vote.

Bielecki, a 40-year-old businessman who came to office with no political history in the Solidarity movement, is believed to remain the favorite candidate of President Lech Walesa, and he could still wind up with the job.

It is Walesa’s job to nominate the prime minister, who must then be approved by Parliament.

Mazowiecki said after the vote that he and his party allies will try to put together a “majority” government of parties with roots in Solidarity.

Jacek Kuron, an activist in Mazowiecki’s party, also stressed the importance of forming a government from a clear majority of Parliament, indicating the danger many Poles envision from a Parliament paralyzed by unstable voting blocs.

Walesa, speaking from his office in Warsaw, told Polish television that he was not surprised by the confused outcome of the vote.

“It shows we still have a lot of problems in the country,” he said. “In this period of unsolved problems we could expect that society would be split, and that this would be the result.”

An almost certain casualty of the voting will be the finance minister and deputy prime minister, Leszek Balcerowicz, architect of the Polish reform plan that has won wide international approval but has come under increasing domestic political pressure in recent months.

Poland’s push to rapid economic reform began in January, 1990, and in less than two years has brought huge changes to the country. Where before there were only a handful of private businesses, there are now more than 5 million. In two years, nearly half a million automobiles have been imported. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of energetic businessmen have become rich, virtually overnight.

At the same time, in a society where a strong egalitarian strain has been inculcated for four decades, the newly rich are often resented. A spate of financial scandals, some involving highly placed figures, has suggested to some that a new class of robber barons has arrived to replace the Communists.

Unemployment had caused further disenchantment. Always negligible to nonexistent under the Communists, the number of jobless has risen to 2 million (in a work force of 17 million). Many large state-owned factories have been pushed to the edge of bankruptcy, their work forces cut drastically.

While wages have generally risen (to an average of $160 a month), prices have gone up even more, with the cost of many items on a par with prices in Western Europe.

As Walesa suggested, these often-conflicting forces are reflected in the division of the parliamentary votes.

Young entrepreneurs, for example, were thought to count heavily in the support for Bielecki’s Liberal Democratic Congress Party. A typically disgruntled former bureaucrat in the hinterland may well have voted for the Peasants Party. Urban schoolteachers, with their low pay and reduced education budgets, would have been likely supporters of Mazowiecki’s Democratic Union.

Supporters of the hard-line right-wing Movement for an Independent Poland, which took a surprising 8.2% of the vote, may have been voting in support of a tough line against former Communists now enriching themselves in business.

The SDRP and the Peasants Party, with their old links to the past, are not likely to be invited into a coalition with the now-fractured remnants of Solidarity, but, with about 97 seats in the 460-member Parliament between them, their bloc could wield considerable power on some social issues.