Profile : Poland’s Youngest Prime Minister Still Mostly a Mystery : Secretive and suspicious, Waldemar Pawlak is nonetheless popular. He has turned the Establishment upside down by refusing to play politics.

The spokeswoman in the government press office was apologetic, but there was nothing that she could do. The 13-sentence biography was the only information available on Waldemar Pawlak, Poland’s new prime minister.

The official release did not mention his wife’s name, the names or ages of his three children, or anything about his life in the tiny village in central Poland where the farmer-turned-prime minister, now one month in office, got his political start eight years ago.

Its most personal disclosure: Pawlak, 34, has an intense interest in food production and agricultural policy.

“It is the only biography that exists,” said spokeswoman Barbara Pohl, who filled in some gaps by asking around the office. (His wife’s name is Elzbieta, but no clue about her age.)

Pohl confessed her new boss remains an official mystery in this country of 38 million.

“This is characteristic of the information policy of this government,” she sighed in frustration. “He doesn’t say a lot, and even when he does speak, he almost doesn’t open his mouth.”

The youngest prime minister in his country’s history, Pawlak has turned the Warsaw political Establishment upside down by refusing to play the familiar political game in post-Communist Poland. Unlike his loquacious, Solidarity-bred predecessors, who happily governed in the glare of klieg lights and traveled Warsaw’s chummy political circuit, this prime minister is a dour, country-born technocrat who prefers private work sessions to public pronouncements, forbids cigarette smoking in his presence and considers a good time to be an evening alone at his computer.

Pawlak is said to detest press conferences, to distrust the mass media and even to prefer to limit his remarks when speaking to large gatherings of his own Polish Peasants Party.

He is so intensely private that his closest aide professed in an interview not to know the names or ages of his children.

“It is an indication that it is not a subject of our discussions,” said Michal Strak, the prime minister’s chief of staff, who turned to one of Pawlak’s body guards for the information (Lidia, 8; Robert, 5, and Maciej, 2).

Last year, when Pawlak was appointed prime minister but stepped down after 33 days without forming a government, he accepted the post without telling his family.

His wife told reporters that she learned of her husband’s new job from television.

“He is calm,” she said. “Or maybe just self-restrained?”

Among Pawlak’s first directives last month to the party caucus in the Sejm, the lower house of Parliament, was an order to keep a low profile, especially around reporters.

When that was not possible, he told his party faithful, say nothing of substance or try to change the subject.

In his few television appearances since becoming prime minister on Oct. 18, Pawlak has appeared stiff, cautious and ill-at-ease--as if he had his eye on the exit during the entire interview, one commentator noted.

(When The Times requested an interview with the new prime minister, his office offered up Strak instead, pleading that Pawlak was too busy.)

“He doesn’t make the slightest effort to answer the question when you talk to him,” said Dominika Wielowieyska, political reporter for Gazeta Wyborcza, Warsaw’s largest and most influential daily newspaper. “You have to ask the same question in many different ways to draw out any sort of an answer.”

Some of Pawlak’s own party members and his Democratic Left Alliance coalition partners in the Sejm complain that he is equally guarded with them, choosing to confide in a small circle of associates carefully controlled by Strak, a former aide to Communist-era leader Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski.

Strak met his boss while Jaruzelski was president and Pawlak was a deputy in the Communist-controlled Parliament.

Pawlak’s penchant for secrecy almost caused the collapse of his fragile coalition government even before he delivered its opening parliamentary address.

The furor erupted when the new premier submitted his proposed Cabinet to President Lech Walesa without first revealing his choices to Aleksander Kwasniewski, leader of his coalition partners.

Kwasniewski’s party finished ahead of the Peasants Party in the September elections, agreeing to back Pawlak as prime minister only if he ran all important staffing decisions past Kwasniewski.

When Pawklak ignored the requirement, the Democratic Left leader was furious, threatening to pull out of the coalition.

“He has a tendency to be like a fuehrer, “ said former Sejm Speaker Mikolaj Kozakiewicz, a onetime adviser who had a falling out with his party chief shortly before the elections. “He is an intelligent man; he is not stupid. But he is very manipulative and doesn’t trust anybody, except those very close to him. He demands complete obedience.”

Pawlak’s supporters say his uncommon style is more a reflection of his simple country upbringing than a slap at the political Establishment.

He was raised on the family farm, married his village sweetheart and returned to run the 42-acre holding after graduating from Warsaw Technical University with a degree from the Motor Vehicles and Mechanical Tools faculty.

“I was born in 1959 in the Polish countryside in a system which we Poles did not choose,” he has said. “I did not create this system, but I want to change it.”

His image as a “countryside activist” with down-home principles has served him well in building the Peasants Party into a powerful political player in post-Communist Poland, despite its narrow rural base and its strong ties to the former Communist regime.

Pawlak is the party’s second prime minister, the other serving before World War II.

Six years after joining the party, Pawlak was elected its chairman, thanks to shrewd political skills even his critics admire.

He maintains an old-fashioned view of party leadership, insisting on strong central control, and he has kept the party chairman and parliamentary caucus leader titles for himself even while serving as prime minister.

Strak said Pawlak understands his political base in the countryside, and he considers it a priority not to drift away from it as prime minister.

His political handlers have concluded that tampering with his style “would bring more problems than profit,” Strak said, so the prime minister is left “to be like he is.”

So far the strategy has been a huge success among the electorate.

Pawlak’s Peasants Party draws almost all of its votes from rural areas, but public opinion polls show that the prime minister enjoys widespread popularity.

A poll by the Pentor Institute after the elections, but before Pawlak was designated prime minister, found him to be the most popular candidate in the country.

Subsequent polls show him attracting even a greater following, with 25% of the electorate claiming to have voted for his party--when, in fact, it collected 16% of the ballots.

Pollsters say people are drawn to the very traits that have alienated journalists and some political colleagues.

“He is seen as a personality that is entirely different from the stereotypical leader,” Pentor manager Eugeniusz Smilowski said. “The stereotypical leader of the previous governments was someone who was outspoken, self-confident and knew how to speak well. Pawlak is seen as a countryside activist, someone who simply knows the value of hard work and dealing with difficult conditions.”

The unanswered question, however, is how popular Pawlak will remain once he settles into the nitty-gritty of governing a country that is still struggling with its transition to a market economy and where his agricultural constituency expects him to turn back the clock on reforms.

In his first speech to the Sejm, Pawlak strongly criticized the harsh economic medicine of his predecessor, Hanna Suchocka, continuing to strike the populist tone that helped his party and the Democratic Left--both with roots in the Communist past--to oust Suchocka’s Solidarity-based coalition.

Yet he has also pledged not to undermine hard-won economic gains in Poland, among the fastest growing countries in Europe.

“I am not sure he is mature enough to handle that sort of pressure,” former adviser Kozakiewicz said. “He is like a pilot who has mastered flying a glider, but now finds himself in a 747.”

A confident Pawlak, however, has predicted that his government will be the first in democratic Poland to serve its entire four-year term. “Poles are realists and want their authorities to treat them like partners, to tell the truth and to draw realistic conclusions,” he said.

Biography

* Name: Waldemar Pawlak

* Title: Polish prime minister.

* Age: 34

* Personal: Born in countryside. Degree from Motor Vehicles and Mechanical Tools faculty, Warsaw Technical University. Ran family farm. Chairman of Peasants Party. Youngest prime minister in Poland’s history. Dour, suspicious and intensely private. Married to Elzbieta. Three children: Lidia, 8; Robert, 5; Maciej, 2.

* Quote: “We are set apart from our predecessors, not by general goals but primarily by the methods and means of attaining these goals.”