Poland’s Leading Presidential Candidate Is Sharp, Urbane--and an Ex-Communist : Politics: Soviet-era party has a new name, a new look and a chance of ousting Lech Walesa.

Aleksander Kwasniewski wants to be the next president of Poland, and like many candidates here, he has looked westward for his electoral bag of tricks.

Kwasniewski travels for days at a time on a big blue campaign bus. He convenes folksy town meetings in faraway places. And for enlightenment, he peruses 1992 videotapes of Bill Clinton working crowds--even studying the way the U.S. presidential hopeful clutched the microphone.

“The bus has been a good idea--it is a symbol of everyday society,” Kwasniewski said. “The inspiration came from Bill Clinton.”

The populist formula seems to be paying off. Opinion polls show Kwasniewski, 40, comfortably atop a field of 17 candidates in Sunday’s vote.

Pollsters say he is virtually assured of qualifying for an expected runoff election two weeks later, most probably against incumbent President Lech Walesa.

Borrowing Western campaign tactics has become popular in a country where the tradition of free elections is barely 6 years old and voters are choosing a president for only the second time since the Politburo stopped dictating top government assignments.

Some candidates have altered their hairstyles, gone on crash diets and hired wardrobe consultants. Others have turned to slick billboard and television campaigns. One contender has proposed a “Contract for Poland,” inspired by the similarly named manifesto of U.S. Republicans.

But the case of Aleksander Kwasniewski carries special significance because the candidate with the most Western-style campaign--and the best shot at forcing Walesa, the symbol of Poland’s struggle against communism, into early retirement--is a former Communist who remained loyal to his party until the very end.

“This election is pivotal in the sense that it will show how much the past still matters in Poland,” said a Western diplomat who has followed the campaign closely. “Communism still matters to a lot of people. The question is how much.”

Kwasniewski is a former rising star in the Communist Party who was consistently positioned on the wrong side of the democratic struggles in Poland, which set off an avalanche of reform in the 1980s that ultimately buried the Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe.

Young, ambitious and opportunistic, he quickly adapted to the changing political landscape, however, and became the telegenic choice of ousted apparatchiks to head the Communist Party’s democratic successor, the Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland.

His good looks, charm and sophistication--he speaks three foreign languages, wears classic suits and has traveled the world--have made him a popular poster child for Poland’s new-look reformed Communists. He favors Poland’s admission to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union and backs reforms needed to complete its transformation to a market economy, all of which make him politically correct in a country eager to shed its backward East Bloc image.

“The [former Communist] hard-liners are older and older, and they are not active, thank God, in politics,” Kwasniewski said in an interview. “There has been a change in generation in my party. The leaders are now in their 30s and 40s, and for us it is very important to organize Poland as a democratic state.”

Kwasniewski and his party have taken to democratic electoral politics in a big way. Not only has he skillfully followed Clinton’s example, but the collection of leftist parties his candidacy represents--the Democratic Left Alliance--won control of both houses of the Parliament in elections two years ago.

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At the same time, parties born from the Solidarity movement have failed miserably, splintering into competing factions that have been unable to agree on a common electoral program, let alone a single presidential nominee. The disarray has left Walesa and his appointees as the only Solidarity activists still in key government jobs.

A Kwasniewski victory would give the former Communists a democratic sweep of the posts their onetime party controlled by dictate, eliminating Solidarity-bred politicians from any position of authority.

In what some analysts hail as a tribute to Poland’s maturing democracy and others decry as evidence of its continued frailty, Kwasniewski has an even chance of pulling off the democratic coup, according to public opinion surveys.

“Poles are looking for a professional to be their president,” said Lena Kolarska-Bobinska, who heads the respected CBOS polling agency. “Kwasniewski is one face of professionalism, and Walesa is another face of professionalism. They represent the division between the post-Communists and Solidarity. No matter which president will be elected, all of Polish society will not be very happy.”

In a practical sense, a Kwasniewski victory would not turn back the clock to the dark days of communism. Walesa has acknowledged as much, and Kwasniewski has repeatedly pronounced the People’s Republic of Poland dead. He has also apologized for the pain the Communist Party inflicted upon Poles.

In the two years Kwasniewski’s post-Communist alliance has dominated Parliament, the pace of some economic reforms has slowed, but the blame has generally fallen on the junior coalition partner, the Polish Peasant Party.

The Polish economy continues to be among the fastest-growing in Europe, and there has also been no assault on the democratic freedoms secured during the Solidarity revolution.

But Poland has always been keen on symbols, and some analysts fear a Kwasniewski victory would send the wrong message to ordinary Poles still adjusting to the often difficult ways of democracy.

Critics say it is too early to reward a Communist Party loyalist with democratic Poland’s top job. A victory for Kwasniewski would also hasten the return of former apparatchiks--many of whom are not as progressive as their party leader--to top civil service posts.

“Not now. It is too early for this,” said Lech Falandysz, a former top aide to Walesa who quit earlier this year in a dispute with the president. “The Communists are just waiting for a comeback, for some sort of moral symbol of vengeance against Solidarity as a pay-back. They were humiliated by Solidarity . . . and they want to recover after the disaster.”

Kwasniewski’s path to the threshold of power has been the antithesis of the one taken by Walesa, a scrappy shipyard electrician who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his struggles against communism as leader of the Solidarity labor movement.

While Walesa was out of work in the late 1970s because of his anti-Communist activities, Kwasniewski, a student in Walesa’s hometown of Gdansk, bucked the anti-communism trend sweeping Poland and enrolled as a Communist Party member.

When Walesa defiantly climbed the Gdansk shipyard wall in 1980 to support striking workers, Kwasniewski was in Warsaw running cultural programs for a large students organization--and quietly building his reputation in influential Communist circles.

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Five years later, while Walesa headed the outlawed Solidarity trade union, Kwasniewski was enlisted by Communist authorities as minister for sports and youth activities, a fresh face in a rotting regime looking for new credibility.

Finally, in 1989, when the Communists reluctantly transferred power to Solidarity, Kwasniewski and Walesa sat on opposite sides of the negotiating table.

“This history is our history, and there are some people who are very satisfied with it and some who are disappointed,” Kwasniewski said. “It is very easy to describe the situation before 1989 in terms of good boys and bad boys, good system and bad system, black things and white things. In fact, the situation was much more complex than that. . . . We know very well what was negative, but we must also say that millions of people did a lot of positive things.”

Kwasniewski’s critics fear that Polish democracy is not stable enough to entrust both the executive and legislative branches of government to his former Communists, though there is no evidence that his party would abuse such authority. Walesa has skillfully exploited this fear during the campaign, insisting that only he has the experience and international clout to keep the former Communists in check.

The strategy has paid off, helping a sagging Walesa reelection campaign surge ahead of several prominent contenders in recent public opinion surveys, even though Walesa has been hugely unpopular during most of his five-year term and many commentators had earlier written off his chances for reelection.

In a sign of Walesa’s resurgence, the Solidarity trade union, which had bitterly accused Walesa of abandoning the cause of workers, last month voted to support his reelection. And many right-wing supporters of candidate Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, the respected president of the Polish National Bank who had been the top challenger to Kwasniewski, began conceding that Walesa was their only hope.

“Do you want me to look nicer? I will try, but it is impossible. I am not reformable,” said Walesa, 52, whose combative and unpolished image stands in sharp contrast to Gronkiewicz-Waltz and the other well-packaged candidates.

“But I am absolutely sure those of us responsible for Poland have proved what we can do in dangerous moments. I think all of the people who feel responsible for Poland know who should lead Poland.”

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Lesek Balcerowicz, the architect of Poland’s successful economic reform program, said the winner of the election will set the tone for the country’s ongoing transformation. Although Poland’s economic and political progress may be irreversible, he said, public confidence in the dramatic changes is not.

“We still have a lot of work to be done,” said Balcerowicz, who heads Parliament’s leading opposition party, which has nominated its own presidential candidate. “We covered a lot of ground in the first years, but we still have more to do.”