As a concession to the PZPR, 65 per cent of the seats in the lower house were to be reserved for its members, with opposition candidates permitted to contest the remaining 35 per cent. The elections to the new Senate were to be unrestricted. The next elections, to be held in 1993, were to be entirely free. General Kiszczak declared that the agreement ’closed a chapter in our history and opened a new one’.
The elections were held in two rounds. The first, on 4 June, proved a fiasco for the Party. Solidarność won ninety-nine out of the one hundred seats in the Senate, with the remaining one going to a non-Party businessman. In the Sejm, its candidates won outright in all but one of the open seats, while thirty-three of the Party’s nominees standing for seats reserved for the Party, including General Kiszczak and Prime Minister Rakowski, failed to get the
minimum number of votes required. A mortified Jaruzelski had to ask Wałęsa whether he would agree to change the rules so that some of these could be rerun at the second round. Wałęsa magnanimously obliged.
The entire communist establishment had been humiliated. The leadership of the PZPR had no idea how to deal with the new situation, and there was no guidance on hand from Moscow. It had been assumed that Jaruzelski would be president, but since he would have to be elected by the two chambers of the Sejm, in which the opposition had a majority, this was open to question.
Despite its resounding victory, the opposition was hesitant. It had conducted a vigorous campaign, with the support of people of all ages and from all walks of life, yet the turnout had been no more than 62 per cent. Such a level of apathy in the electorate was the consequence of ten years of frustration, of a fatalistic conviction that nothing would ever change, and of the psychological exhaustion resulting from years of poor living conditions, stress, food shortages and poor health. It dictated caution and restraint.
In behind-the-scenes discussions Jaruzelski proposed a coalition government under General Kiszczak, and Wałęsa put forward Tadeusz Mazowiecki. Michnik suggested the compromise of ’your president, our prime minister’ as a basis for agreement, and this was taken up by US President George Bush, who was on a longscheduled visit to Poland and addressed both chambers of the Sejm on 10 July. Jacek Kuroń went on television to explain that it was essential to allow the presidency to go to Jaruzelski, in order to reassure Russia about Poland’s position within the Warsaw Pact. On 19 July the General was duly elected, by one vote. On 12 September Mazowiecki named his government, which included five ministers from the PZPR, including Kiszczak as Minister of the Interior and another general as Minister of Defence, to reassure the Kremlin that its security system was safe.
TWENTY-FOUR
It is a historical given that the recovery of independence brings with it problems those struggling to achieve it had never foreseen or even believed possible. In Poland’s case, the usual problems were aggravated by the scale of the violence done to the country and the people over the preceding half-century, and above all by the psychological damage inflicted by decades of untruth and moral manipulation.
The government headed by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, often referred to as the contractual government, applied itself with remarkable determination to the immediate problems facing the country. The Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz employed shock therapy to bring inflation under control and introduced a package of reforms which in effect created a free market. The Minister of Labour and Social Affairs Jacek Kuroń energetically tackled the social costs of the previous decade. The Foreign Minister, Krzysztof Skubiszewski, set about repositioning Poland with regard to its neighbours and preparing for its admittance into the Council of Europe. The government did not neglect purely political issues, amending the constitution in December 1989, replacing the Citizens’Militia with a state police force, and establishing fully independent organs of local government. But it was soon overtaken by events.
On 9 November the Berlin Wall came down. The collapse of communist power in East Germany precipitated the ’velvet revolution’ in Czechoslovakia and similar upheavals in Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, effectively bringing to an end the Soviet hegemony imposed on the area in 1945. As if in recognition of this, at the end of January 1990 Poland’s Communist Party (PZPR) dissolved itself.