Communism: Poland, A Humiliation For the Party

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The contrast was stupefying. In December 1981, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa was arrested along with more than 6,000 fellow union members in a martial-law crackdown that seemed to shatter their movement and, with it, all hope of freedom and reform in Communist Poland. Last week Walesa found himself at the center of a very different situation. His forces had just whipped the Communist Party in the country's first truly democratic elections since 1947, causing a constitutional logjam that for the moment left unclear exactly how and by whom Poland would be governed. Walesa, 46, his trademark mustache now gray and his stocky build padded with extra poundage, warned supporters shortly after the vote, "It's too early for congratulations."

Perhaps so. But it was not too early for the world to recognize Poland's remarkable political performance for what it was: in the year of Communism's historic identity crisis -- a time of glasnost in the Soviet Union, brutal repression in China and political unease in the rest of Eastern Europe -- Poland had launched a democratic experiment unique in the Communist world. "It makes us rethink the proposition that Stalinism is eternal," said a U.S. official. "Now we don't know for sure that Stalinism is above being reformed."

The official results announced at midweek showed a Solidarity landslide. Union-backed candidates won 92 of 100 seats in the newly created Senate and 160 of 161 Sejm (lower house) seats set aside for opposition and independent candidates. Although the remaining 299 Sejm seats were automatically allotted to the Communists and their allies, only five of their candidates garnered the required 50% of the vote. Most of those unfilled seats will be decided in runoff elections on June 18.

For the so-called national list of the Communist Party and its allies, a special slate of 35 prominent candidates who ran unopposed, there might be no second round. A majority of voters, eager to reject the whole Communist system, scratched all but two names off the ballot; 33 candidates were defeated and their seats thrown into limbo. That unexpected result triggered a constitutional crisis, since the electoral law requires a full 460-member Sejm but provides no mechanism for filling the vacant seats. Until these legal obstacles are resolved, the Parliament cannot fill the presidency, a powerful new post that was expected to go to party leader Wojciech Jaruzelski. Among the defeated national-list candidates were some of Jaruzelski's most reform- minded allies, including Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski, Interior Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak and Politburo member Jozef Czyrek. Their presence in Parliament was deemed crucial to forming a working relationship between the Communists and the opposition.

The Communist wipeout threatened to shatter the delicate power-sharing agreement that the party and Solidarity negotiated earlier this year. Not only was there a fear of backlash from angry Communist hard-liners opposed to compromise, but there was also a serious question of how the country could be governed when its ruling party had been overwhelmingly rejected by the electorate.