WARSAW LETTER:Poland has good reason to be proud as it may be the only economy in the region not to shrink this year
ANYONE WHO doubts the power of the ballot box has forgotten June 4th, 1989, in Poland.
Though the Berlin Wall would stand for another five months, this day 20 years ago was when Poland’s communist leadership experienced its high noon.
The country’s first semi-free elections in 40 years ended the communists’ grip on power and started the Cold War thaw.
The idea of controlled elections emerged from round table talks with the Solidarity trade union. With the move, communist leader Gen Wojciech Jaruzelski hoped to ease demands for full democracy.
In an attempt to retain power, the communists set rules to ensure the poll was neither free nor fair: the election to the new 100-seat upper house or Senate was open to all, but Solidarity was only allowed to contest 161 of the 460 seats in the lower house, the Sejm. The parliament would then elect a president, with only one candidate: Gen Jaruzelski.
It was a last, desperate stand against the movement that grew out of the Gdansk shipyard protests of the 1970s. Gen Jaruzelski’s first attempt to crack down, declaring martial law in 1981, drove Solidarity underground but did not stop the movement’s growth.
Agreeing to round table talks, then to elections, meant the genie was out of the bottle.
Despite state attempts to control the election, Solidarity triumphed, winning all 161 Sejm seats and 99 of the 100 senate seats. Communist authoritarian rule in Poland was history.
An Irish Times editorial celebrated the news with the headline: “Poland the Brave.” Looking back now, many Poles say they felt more scared than brave.
“My entire youth, I was worried about the question: will the Soviets enter Poland?” says prime minister Donald Tusk. He remembers himself in 1989 as a “curly-haired Solidarity activist”, married with two children, living in a university dormitory and publishing an underground newspaper.
“On June 4th I just felt tremendous satisfaction. ‘We finally got to them. We won.’ Without reprisals, without bloodshed. And this while still under pressure from the Soviet Union.”
The shadow of Moscow over Poland’s transition to democracy is one that can still be felt today. Like Ireland’s pro- and anti-treaty political factions, modern Polish politics is dominated by two opposing groups arising from the events of 1989.
Mr Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO), allied with Solidarity leader and former president Lech Walesa, says the negotiated handover was the only way to ensure peaceful change at a time when no one knew what would happen next, and no one knew what Moscow would accept.
But some former Solidarity activists see it differently. They argue that Poland still suffers from not having a clean break with the past.
In their view, the transition to democracy was a lazy compromise that allowed the communists to hold on to their privileges and, through old boys’ networks, their power.
It’s an argument that led twin brothers Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski to break with Lech Walesa, and go on to win parliamentary and presidential elections with their Law and Justice (PiS) party.
Their allies, custodians of the secret police archive, never tire of unearthing files which they say demonstrate just how rotten the compromise actually was.
They have also targeted Walesa, claiming that, as a protest leader in the 1970s, he informed to the communists using the code name “Bolek”.
Walesa admits loose contacts, saying it was unavoidable for a man in his position, but he denies systematically spying on the Solidarity movement.
The battle over the legacy of 1989 remains the dominant political narrative, but distracts from the country’s extraordinary transition in just two short decades.
“Polish history is as hard as Irish history, but the last 20 years here have been the best in Poland’s last 200 years,” says Leszek Balcerowicz, the former finance minister and driving force behind Poland’s economic shock therapy.
Despite the huge economic hardships it created, Balcerowicz stands by the plan as a successful example of a transition from planned to market economy.
“We inherited an awful economic situation. Poland was effectively bankrupt, we owed a huge debt to the rest, inflation was running at between 20 and 50 per cent a month.” And considering Poland’s economic strength today – it is likely to be the only economy in the region not to shrink this year – Balcerowicz even sounds a little proud.
“Our GDP is 77 per cent higher than in 1989, our market economy is more western than many western countries,” he says. “We had on average 15 per cent of western per capita income. Now we’re at 50 per cent and rising. And people have freedom, to migrate, to come back.”
That message of freedom is one that Donald Tusk wants to go out from today’s June 4th memorial ceremony in Krakow.
“People believe there is no risk to their freedom,” he says. “But we need to take care of it and remind all of Europe that freedom will vanish as soon as you take it for granted. At a time of economic crisis it’s an important lesson to remember.”
