Dreaming about 4th Republic: Radical Clean-Up and National Sovereignty in Post-Election Poland
Central Europe Digest
Posted: 18 May 2006
by Filip Staniłko
Although six months have now passed since the last parliamentary elections in Poland, Poles continue to ruminate on their results. The elections saw the ruling postcommunist party (Democratic Left Alliance, SLD) suffer a spectacular loss after four years in office. This loss was brought about primarily by the party's exceedingly incompetent rule, but also by the conclusions of three investigative commissions of the Polish parliament. What these commissions revealed stunned the nation. They disclosed ties - for years concealed - between the ruling SLD party and the media giant Agora (the editor of the largest daily, "Gazeta Wyborcza"). They revealed patronage links between the presidential palace of Aleksander Kwasniewski, intelligence services, affluent business leaders, and the national energy monopolist. They exposed deliberate malpractices in the privatization of the national insurance leviathan. Furthermore, in the course of the commissions' proceedings it became apparent that the sum of these mafia-like relations and practices - the so-called "postcommunist set-up" - functioned at ease in the changing political circumstances, and it managed to co-opt even those who had once been active in anticommunist opposition. It is therefore no wonder that after years of dormancy the Polish public awoke once more to the issue of government corruption. The result was a widespread electoral call for a radical clean-up of state structures and the removal of the former members of communist secret services from positions of public responsibility.
The electoral campaign revived strong hopes among Poles for broad and far-reaching changes. This mood was encapsulated in the slogan calling for "moral revolution" and building the "4th Republic." Having lost all credibility, the incumbent postcommunist parties stood no chance of competing with their two ascending contenders: PiS (big government conservatives) and PO (free market conservatives). This led to a situation in which a tough electoral rivalry between the two parties certain to win the elections became inevitable, despite their common roots in the Solidarity movement. Throughout the campaign, both parties had still been declaring their willingness to form a coalition government with each other. However, following the PiS victory in both parliamentary and presidential elections, this coalition has conspicuously failed to materialize. The causes of this fiasco are unclear. Explanations range from underscoring the psychological mismatch between the leaders of both parties, to a misconceived negotiation strategy of the defeated PO, and an ever-increasing lack of trust between the potential coalition partners (perhaps incited covertly by the threatened "postcommunist set-up.") The most plausible explanation for the failure to form a coalition was PO's reluctance to allow a criminal scrutiny of its members and of the business circles associated with the party.
In the end, key offices in the state - such as that of the president, prime minister and the speaker of the parliament (Sejm) - were taken over by PiS. This would not have been possible without the political backing of two smaller parties: Catholic nationalist LPR and populist ‘Samoobrona.' The leader of the latter, Andrzej Lepper - who has come a long way from being a charismatic organizer of road blockades and instigator of public lynchings (for which he had been repeatedly sentenced by the courts) to becoming a deputy speaker of the new Sejm and currently a minister of agriculture - offered to create a coalition with PiS from the start. However, no one took this offer seriously, as all expected to see a coalition of PO-PiS (which literally means "show-off" in Polish). The situation changed dramatically when President Lech Kaczy?ski's brother, Jaros?aw, announced his intention to build a grand right-wing party in the GOP mold that would unite Catholic nationalists, peasants, conservatives and moderate liberals. Jaros?aw Kaczy?ski, who is an acknowledged political strategist and the founder and leader of PiS, has made his mark through consistent and virulent denunciation of the "postcommunist set-up," as well as his character traits of quarrelsomeness and extreme mistrust of people. Although for years his agenda has been ridiculed by the mainstream media as imaginary, it appears that he has ultimately prevailed and the destruction of the "postcommunist set-up" determines the primary contents of Polish politics today.
Several factors contribute to the prevalence of domestic affairs in Polish politics and most of them have to do with the PiS program, where sovereignty plays the fundamental role. In Mr. Kaczynski's vision of Poland, sovereignty is clearly a multi-faceted notion - with political, economic, and energy-related dimensions. First, there is the polity's sovereignty vis-à-vis the state and its institutions. As such, it explains why PiS representatives make frequent references to the ‘First Solidarity' (1980-1981) tradition. It also sheds light on why the core of the PiS program concerns the struggle for dismantling the ‘captivated state,' i.e. regaining the polity's possession of the state, which has been captivated by informal interest networks (that are rooted in the police state of the 1980s and that were financially revitalized in the 1990s by capturing the gains of privatization). However, one has to doubt whether this can be done with PiS' new coalition partner, Samoobrona. Allegedly, Samoobrona, a collection of notorious lawbreakers, had itself been founded with the assistance of former members of the communist intelligence services and the party finances have always been murky, to say the least. In this context, serious conflicts of interest appear inevitable, especially given that the current government structure - whereby Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz is responsible for governing the state and Jaros?aw Kaczy?ski is charged with creating a grand right-wing party - does little to avert opportunities for disagreement.
Second, there is the sovereignty conceived in economic terms, which hinges upon the development of a robust national financial sector similar to Germany and Spain. The abundance of Polish financial institutions was sold to foreign investors in the 1990s according to the precepts of Leszek Balcerowicz's neoliberal vision of exceedingly open capital markets - a deal executed mainly by the Akcja Wyborcza Solidarnosc administration (1997-2001). This accounts for the Marcinkiewicz government's opposition to the merger of Pekao and BPH, Poland's second and third largest banks respectively. The merger had been propelled by the banks' Italian owner, UniCredit group, and had been merely a local consequence of their trans-European takeover of the German owner of BPH, approved by the European Commission. Despite the fact that the Polish government and UniCredit did eventually reach a compromise settlement, Warsaw remains in disagreement with the European Union over the interpretation of its prerogatives. The unresolved issue is whether Brussels' approval of a merger amounts to an obligation to enforce that merger in particular member states of the union. If the current government is offering any outlook at all for further privatizations, it will be done only through a dynamic Warsaw Stock Exchange and with the primary objective in mind of drawing new foreign direct investments (especially in the manufacturing and services sectors).
The third facet of sovereignty in the PiS view concerns energy security. This explains the Polish government's strong skepticism toward Vladimir Putin's policies, especially with regard to the ambitious German-Russian undertaking of building a gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea. Poles widely believe that this initiative constitutes a deliberate Russian effort to develop - with German money! - the capability to blackmail Central Europe by threats of cutting off its gas supplies without exacerbating its relations with Germany. The January dispute with Ukraine has already proven that Moscow is willing to carry out such policies. A completion of the pipeline would also constitute the next step forward toward an energetic subordination of the European Union by Russia (already hinted at, for instance, by the Russian threats of contracting more gas deliveries to China or by the prospective commercialization of Gazprom, which would allow Moscow to raise sufficient funds to modernize its obsolete gas transportation facilities). Mr. Marcinkiewicz's government endorsed the idea of establishing an ‘Energy NATO,' that would be based on the "all for one" principle. Despite its very reluctant reception by Germany and France - Russia's traditional friends in Europe - the European Commission shared the Polish government's concerns and expressed its worries in its green book on energy. One should expect that Poland will respond to the ever closer cooperation between Berlin and Moscow with growing pressure on Brussels - for instance, to force Russia to liberalize its policies concerning foreign access to the Russian pipelines (which would make it possible to buy gas from other parties such as Kazakhstan).
The first signals of Poland's increased presence in shaping European eastern policy (especially during the January dispute between Russia and Ukraine) and Warsaw's increasingly tough stance toward Russia (already announced during the electoral campaign) have led to a conspicuous warming of President Putin's rhetoric vis-à-vis Poland. However, Polish foreign policy today is neither thorough nor methodical. Some of President Lech Kaczynski's recent visits abroad aimed primarily at breaking the ice and dispelling the foreign leaders' mistrust toward his person. The marginal status of foreign policy in Poland has also been made evident by the weak position and recent resignation of professional diplomat and Foreign Affairs Minister Stefan Meller. In addition, Poland is not devoid of problems concerning its inability to conduct effective communications with the European bureaucracy. This is partly due to injudicious nominations to important posts in the Polish administration, but, above all, to the administration's anarchic structure.
Filip Stani?ko is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, analyst in the Center for Political Thought, and member of the editorial board of bimonthly Arcana.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Center for European Policy Analysis.