Problems of Postcommunism: From Solidarity to Fragmentation

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Krzysztof Jasiewicz directs electoral studies at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. In the 1980s, he was coauthor of a series of political attitude surveys known as The Poles of '80, '81, '84, '88, '90. He is currently a visiting professor of sociology at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. "The complex political situation in Poland stems from a misguided and ill-designed electoral law." This diagnosis of Poland's political problems came from Zbigniew Brzezinski a few days before the parliamentary elections of 27 October 1991. According to Gazeta wyborcza, Brzezinski told President Lech Walesa that Poland's legislators had made a fundamental error by adopting a system based on proportional representation (PR) for elections to the Sejm (the lower house of Parliament). "This electoral law will disperse the will of the people and will not provide a basis for the emergence of a democratic majority (in the Sejm)," he added. ~ Subsequent events seemed to reveal the accuracy of Brzezinski's warnings, as Polish voters elected candidates from some 30 different political parties or groupings to the Sejm; the strongest party controls a mere 62 out of the 460 total seats, and no majority coalition of fewer than five parties is possible. Given these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that it took two months to form a weak, three-party minority government. The crowning irony was that this happened just two years after Solidarity--seemingly a unified, if not homogeneous, political movement--swept the communists virtually out of power in the historic elections of June 1989. Of course, a bad electoral law alone could never explain such a striking turn of events, as Brzezinski well knew. As early as 1990, a deep split had begun to appear in Solidarity, which had never been perfectly united in the first place. From its sudden emergence in the summer of 1980, Solidarity was a multidimensional phenomenon: a trade