Having Quaffed Success, Friends-of-Beer Party Staggers : Poland: What started as a lark gained 16 seats in Parliament. Then the bickering began.

Political pundits were probably asking themselves the question almost at once: Would success spoil the Polish Party of Friends of Beer?

What would happen, fresh from the party’s ballot box success on Oct. 27, when, contrary to all expectations, including its own, the final tally of seats for Poland’s new Parliament was 16--count ‘em, 16--for the Friends of Beer?

Would this emergence as an actual and recognizable faction in the Polish Parliament, the Sejm, push these merry pranksters down the pathway of all Polish political organizations?

Would the Polish Friends of Beer, in happy hangover, find themselves, like poor old Solidarity, split into shards like a mirror dropped on the pavement? Would they too be macerated by jealousies and obscure grievances, transformed overnight into a sort of ideological amoeba, endlessly dividing?

The public here has waited with not-very-bated breath and, of course, has not been disappointed. Poles enjoy nothing more than watching triumph turn to ashes, a process that they tend to view as a metaphor for historical inevitability, which is why they like the idea of electing Lech Walesa president and then immediately ranking his job performance, in public opinion polls, somewhere below the sanitation department.

So, naturally, they were not much shocked or aggrieved--to the extent that they cared at all--when the usual Polish political disease infected the Friends of Beer.

“Actually,” said Janusz Ravinski, the comedian-showman who is the front man for what is now the largest faction of the Friends of Beer, “our problems started when it first looked like we might actually win some seats. I could see it right away--we were going to split into small beer and large beer, light beer and dark beer.”

The small-beer faction, now reduced to a parliamentary contingent of three, is meanwhile holding out in the party’s campaign headquarters across the river from Warsaw in the neighborhood of Praga. It has refused to decamp despite threats from the nominal leader of the bigger faction, who turned up a few days ago with five armed police officers, determined to throw them out and thus gain control of the party’s computer and its photocopying machine, the organization’s chief material assets, along with the stack of obsolete political posters piled in the corner.

“To some extent, it was, indeed, a lark at the beginning,” said Piotr Kaczorowski, 33, the man who bravely faced down the police officers and the hegemonic tactics of the large-beer faction. The idea was hatched over a few beers by some writers for a low-rent magazine called Pan (Sir), featuring cars, guns and cheesecake. “No one took it seriously, running for office,” Kaczorowski said. “We did have a ‘congress,’ ” he went on, “but it was just a big party. . . . It was in the Palace of Culture. About 600 people came. It was fun.”

Somewhere along the line, however, things got more intense, if not more serious, and it was thought that Ravinski, well-known from TV and satirical cabaret, could be recruited as a candidate, thus adding some box-office appeal.

Then someone realized that, to qualify for the ballot, thousands of signatures had to be gathered. And since the rank and file of the Friends of Beer were not inclined toward the actual labor of gathering signatures, the signature gatherers would have to be hired.

Thus the issue of money first reared its head. According to Kaczorowski, matters went downhill from there.

“We appealed to businessmen,” Kaczorowski said, “as all parties have to do. In return,” he added, “they would be able to represent their own interests in Parliament.”

Since the occupation of “businessman” in Poland has these days taken on a political rectitude roughly equal to the moral authority of the priesthood, the quid pro quo was natural and untroubling. All the businessman-candidates would have to do is mouth the somewhat torturous concept that Ravinski (in his latter-day role as a large-beer representative) has come up with.

“You can’t have good-quality beer,” he said the other day, “without good breweries, and you can’t talk about good beer without taking into consideration the economic situation. So, we are for good economic principles, for a modern, market economy.”

The leader of the small-beer faction, Adam Halber, wouldn’t necessarily disagree with the economic orientation of large beer (whose parliamentary group has taken to calling itself, somewhat tendentiously, “the Economic Program of Poland”). But he does seem hurt that large beer has taken on pompous airs.

“Now that we have success,” he said, “they say it isn’t seemly for a businessman to be associated with the Friends of Beer. It’s not us who don’t want to be with them. They don’t want to be with us.”

Did they sell out?

“Maybe they didn’t sell out,” Halber said. “They just rented us for some time.”

It’s a situation full of ironies and echoes. Halber viewed the Friends of Beer campaign as one aimed at “reconciliation,” as a way to form “a catalyst between the government and the governed.” He said the party aimed at “a new political culture, at tolerance, something not so serious.” Now reconciliation within his own larky party seems a lost hope.

“A group of businessmen joined us,” Halber said, “and they were not interested in our program. The party, the rank and file, the voters, they were not interested in business. We had to split. They hijacked the party.”

“I cannot use their terminology,” Ravinski counters. “I would not use their tactics, their expelling people from the party. I would call this man Halber naturally Bolshevistic. Bolshevistic people are always guided by the same principle. If someone created something beautiful--a Winter Palace, say--they come in and destroy it.”

So it’s come to that, and only a month after the election.

Meanwhile, the problems of the Friends of Beer provide a small but possibly useful illustration of just what Walesa is up against. For example, among the groups in Parliament, at least six owe their heritage to Solidarity, and not all Walesa’s men or even the Communist Party can put them together again. So far, he has made about the same progress in picking a prime minister acceptable to this fractious lot as the Polish Friends of Beer have in patching up their differences.

And of course, it’s like hitting a moving target. Every day there is a potential new argument, a new falling out, a slight shift in the balance. Right now, the large beer-small beer split is 13-3, and no divisions yet on the large-beer side.

“So far,” Ravinski said. “But it’s early.”