President of Poland Picks New Premier

Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski on Thursday named a former Communist as prime minister, turning aside an appeal by opposition parties for an apolitical “government of experts” to shepherd the country through a contentious espionage scandal.

“The only task of this government is to reconstruct the credibility of Poland,” said Andrzej Potocki, spokesman for the opposition Freedom Union, a party with roots in the Solidarity labor movement. “We are deeply doubtful this can be done now.”

The selection of Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz as the country’s seventh prime minister since 1989 was seen, nonetheless, as a gesture of conciliation toward critics of the current parliamentary majority, which has been in political turmoil over allegations that outgoing Prime Minister Jozef Oleksy was a longtime spy for Moscow.

Although a top official with the governing coalition of ex-Communists, Cimoszewicz, 45, does not belong to its dominant party, and he has demonstrated a strong independent streak throughout his career.

An accomplished lawyer, he studied as a Fulbright scholar at New York’s Columbia University in the early 1980s but spent the latter half of the decade breeding pigs and cattle in eastern Poland after growing disillusioned with political developments in Communist Poland.

Cimoszewicz had been a member of the Polish United Workers’ Party since 1971, but he did not enter parliament as a Communist representative until after the so-called round-table talks in 1989 spelled the end of the Communist monopoly on power. Since then, he has served as deputy prime minister and justice minister before becoming deputy speaker of parliament last year.

“He is a very good choice for the present stormy period in Poland,” said political scientist Adam Bromke, a foreign policy advisor to Oleksy. “He is a man of experience, stature and his own convictions, and I am sure he will remain faithful to those.”

Last year, Cimoszewicz publicly opposed Kwasniewski’s presidential bid, saying it would be less divisive if the former Communists supported a candidate with no links to the Communist past. He also coauthored with Adam Michnik, a prominent anti-Communist and Solidarity activist, an appeal for “truth and unity” among the country’s increasingly divisive political camps.

As an indication of his political pragmatism, however, Cimoszewicz agreed to lead Kwasniewski’s electoral committee once he entered the race. In 1990, Cimoszewicz ran for president as the candidate of former Communists, losing to Solidarity leader Lech Walesa but collecting a respectable 9% of the vote.

If successful in forming a government over the coming two weeks, Cimoszewicz will succeed Oleksy, another former Communist who resigned as prime minister last week over allegations that he knowingly provided classified information to Russian agents in Warsaw.

Oleksy has denied the charges, insisting he did not know that the two Russians, who were officials at the Russian Embassy, worked for Russian intelligence.

But the espionage charges, being investigated by a military prosecutor, have rocked the Polish political scene, prompting the opposition to nominate former Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski to lead a caretaker government until parliamentary elections next year.

Potocki, the opposition spokesman, said that he “estimates highly the intellectual capability and independence” of Cimoszewicz but that even he will be unable to break free of the political alliance he represents.

Bartoszewski, a highly respected elder statesman who was imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp in World War II, had assurances from a majority of parliament members that he would have the necessary support to form a government, Potocki said.

“There were two files on the desk of the president this morning, one of Bartoszewski and one of Cimoszewicz,” Potocki said. “He chose one. The worse one.”