In Poland, It’s Back to the Future

Three years after the former Communists and their rural allies won control of the Polish government in splashy parliamentary elections, their remarkable comeback has quietly penetrated virtually every aspect of political life.

The former Communists and their coalition partners have skillfully exploited successes at the ballot box, culminating in last year’s election of one of their own as president, to strengthen their influence over everything from state-owned television programming to civil service promotions. In this industrial town in central Poland, opposition politicians allege that even state-employed typists are screened for political correctness.

Although few Poles seriously doubt the democratic and free-market conversion of the old Communist guard, the latter has unnerved opposition leaders by sweeping aside many activists associated with the Solidarity trade union movement, the former Communists’ archenemies of the not-so-distant past.

Solidarity-bred officials have not only been relegated to the electoral sidelines in both Parliament and the presidential palace but also have been methodically purged from appointed positions across Poland by the ruling coalition, which wields broad powers over political and economic affairs even at the regional level.

“There are two types of return to the old ways: One would be a return of the old laws and institutions--a so-called hard return--and the other would be a soft return, where the old faces are in the same places but under different banners,” said Edward Wnuk-Lapinski, a prominent political scientist at the Polish Academy of Sciences. “We are observing a soft return in Poland. The old faces are coming back everywhere, but it is now contrary to their interests to return to the old rules of the game.”

Less than seven years ago, Solidarity toppled the Polish United Workers’ Party, as the Communist Party here was called, but its most ambitious leaders quickly regrouped and formed the Democratic Left Alliance, a collection of two dozen parties patched together from pieces of the Communist legacy. The alliance has been governing Poland since 1993 in coalition with the Polish Peasant Party, the democratic successor to a rural party long aligned with the Communists.

Like their counterparts across much of the country, Solidarity politicians in Wloclawek, a bastion of support for the former Communists, complain that an unwritten political litmus test has been applied to state-controlled jobs since the coalition gained power.

They charge that the political screening affects everyone from the regional hospital director to board members of state-owned companies. The personnel changes usually occur slowly and quietly, often through a department reorganization, new hires necessitated by early retirements or competitive job searches that list qualifications tailored for a politically connected candidate.

“There is a rule that you don’t forget your own people,” said Piotr Wisniewski, 35, a Solidarity-bred politician in Wloclawek who lost his state management job two years ago when his department was eliminated after the Solidarity-appointed governor was removed. “The law says jobs should go to the best-qualified experts, but, in fact, the people who choose the experts are the same people dealing the cards.”

The current governor, the second to be appointed by the ruling coalition, denies the allegations, accusing the Solidarity-led opposition of using fear of communism to deflect public attention from Solidarity’s own shortcomings. Widespread changes in personnel, he said, have been necessary for reasons of competence, not political affiliation.

“The opposition has no organization, no influence and no good people,” said Gov. Wladyslaw Kubiak, a former youth activist in the Polish United Workers’ Party, known by its initials in Polish, PZPR. “During the 40 years of [communism], Wloclawek grew very dynamically. People associate this period of prosperity with the rule of the Workers’ Party.”

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At the national level, leaders of Solidarity-based parties say political patronage has crept into virtually every decision of the ruling coalition, posing a threat to the country’s still-unfinished democratic transformation. While a revival of communism itself seems out of the question, a return to its autocratic ethos--where power and patronage are wielded by relatively few--worries many opposition activists.

“Our three years in power was too short a time for creating a democratic and decentralized state,” said former Prime Minister Hanna Suchocka, whose 1993 government was the last led by Solidarity parties. “From this point of view, the last three years in Poland have been lost. The [ruling parties] have been using these years just to secure strong positions for their party loyalists and to strengthen their positions throughout the country.”

Among the changes made by the former Communists and their rural allies since winning parliamentary elections in September 1993:

* Eighty percent of Poland’s 49 regional governors have been dumped in favor of appointees with ties to the ruling coalition. In one of the most bitterly contested moves, the governor of Gdansk--Solidarity’s birthplace--was replaced last month by a former Communist, despite protests from the Solidarity-dominated local assembly.

* A special parliamentary report prepared two years ago urged a revival of the former Moscow-educated foreign service. A string of new appointments followed, which included naming the head of the Communist-era government trade union as ambassador to neighboring Belarus and a former PZPR Central Committee member as envoy to Russia.

* Officials with close ties to the ruling coalition have been placed in several top media positions, including head of the Polish Press Agency and state-owned television, two of the most influential news outlets in the country. Independent producers of some news programs have also been replaced by party faithful, and one popular independent news show was canceled.

* Four of the six new appointees to the powerful Constitutional Tribunal, a 12-member court that decides important legal issues, belonged to the PZPR, and all of them have strong links to the ruling coalition. None of the candidates nominated by the Solidarity-led opposition was confirmed for the posts.

* A civil service reform law passed by Parliament mandates a seven-year experience requirement for top state posts, guaranteeing a huge advantage for Communist-era bureaucrats seeking promotion to the most important civil service jobs.

* The Solidarity-appointed head of the Supreme Audit Chamber, a powerful agency that tracks the government’s financial affairs, has been replaced by a member of junior coalition partner Polish Peasant Party.

* Numerous Solidarity-associated officials at Poland’s most influential banks and state-owned enterprises have been removed from supervisory boards and replaced by people favored by the coalition. The Polish news weekly Wprost, citing CIA sources, recently reported that two-thirds of the country’s biggest companies and banks are controlled by the ruling parties or members of the former secret police.

“In Poland, the government and state still control most of the economy as well as the political administration,” said Maciej Plazynski, the recently fired Solidarity governor of the Gdansk region. “In such a situation, it is unhealthy if personnel changes in all these areas mirror the composition of the government. It makes a certain political composition too powerful at an important point in the country’s transformation.”

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Top leaders of the Democratic Left Alliance and the Polish Peasant Party deny that politics and patronage drive their appointments. Just like the Solidarity governments before them, they say, the current coalition turns to people it knows and trusts to hold key positions. One of their favorite comparisons is the change of administrations in Washington, when wholesale housecleaning is an accepted democratic norm.

“The present coalition of political power in Poland is a result of democratic elections, whether some people like it or not,” said Longin Pastusiak, a parliamentary leader of the Democratic Left Alliance. “We did not complain when everything was taken by the other side; we did not mention they were wielding a monopoly of power, because we respected the democratic process.”

The problem with such an argument, critics say, is that Poland is not yet a stable democratic country in which the periodic transfer of political power from one party to another is considered as routine as the comings and goings of U.S. presidents. It is nonsensical, they say, to compare the collapse of communism in 1989, for example, to the fall of the last Solidarity government in 1993.

“When we started in 1989, we had to destroy some elements of a totalitarian, undemocratic system, which meant replacing many people in important posts,” said Suchocka, the former prime minister. “Many people at that time were loyal not to the state but the Communist Party. There is no similar democratic need now to replace these people with ones loyal to the former Communists.”

During a recent visit here by President Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former Communist who defeated Lech Walesa in presidential elections last November, little effort was made to conceal the widening political chasm between insiders and outsiders in post-Communist Poland.

Kwasniewski travels infrequently in Poland, yet his sole public session here was an invitation-only appearance organized by the local Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland, the most powerful party in the Democratic Left Alliance. Party officials said priority in issuing invitations was given to loyalists who supported Kwasniewski’s presidential bid; in the end, the president’s only exposure to opposition views was through a street demonstration organized by Solidarity.

“It is just like the old days when the first secretary [of the PZPR] would come to town and all those loyal to him would crowd around expecting a handout,” said Krzysztof Jaworski, a Wloclawek City Council member from the Freedom Union, a Solidarity-based opposition party. “The danger presented by this isn’t that democracy will cease to function in Poland but that it will be a sick democracy.”