An Epochal Shift

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Walesa's appeal won the day. The Deputies approved a resolution calling for a Solidarity-led government under Walesa's leadership. The new alliance, with a total of 264 seats in the Sejm, would thus have a majority over the Communists' 173. The next day Walesa, Malinowski and Democratic Party leader Jerzy Jozwiak called at Warsaw's Belvedere Palace, now the presidential residence. After Kiszczak presented his resignation to Jaruzelski, the three party leaders talked with the President for two hours.

Solidarity leaders said afterward that Jaruzelski had accepted "in principle" their offer to form a government. The coalition proposed three Solidarity candidates: Mazowiecki, Bronislaw Geremek, the movement's parliamentary leader, and Jacek Kuron, a senior adviser. It soon became clear that Mazowiecki was Jaruzelski's choice. Said the Prime Minister-designate as he rushed from one meeting to another: "The most difficult task will be to make people think that ((life)) can be better -- even though it cannot be better immediately."

That will be a tall order. Warsaw owes more than $39 billion to the West and 6 billion rubles to Soviet bloc countries. Interest payments alone amount to $3.5 billion annually. Inflation is running at more than 150% and will probably top 200% by year's end. Food supplies are sporadic at best. This month more strikes, some backed by Solidarity, have further damaged the economy.

Although virtually everyone in Poland recognizes the need for economic reforms, the country lacks the money, and has failed so far to demonstrate the political will, to make them. Old factories and unproductive coal mines must be closed, meaning the loss of thousands of jobs. The Communist-dominated bureaucracy and army need to be cut back. Most problematical of all, as Mazowiecki said, living conditions will have to get even worse if they are ever to get better.

In Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Rumania, Solidarity's accession is likely to convince the Old Guard Communist regimes that any concessions to reform could lead to similar disaster for the ruling party. In Prague authorities were girding for the 21st anniversary this week of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion that ended the country's brief liberalization -- an intervention that Poland's Sejm last week condemned. Said a Western diplomat in Budapest last week: "The hard-liners will point to Poland and say, 'That's where you finish up if you let the opposition get a foot in the door.' " In Hungary, where multiparty elections are due to be held soon, Geza Jeszenszky, a spokesman for the opposition Hungarian Democratic Forum, said the success of a Solidarity-led Polish government would probably "increase the confidence of the Hungarian voting public."

Solidarity's failure, however, could easily have the opposite effect. "Walesa is going to be criticized for certain," predicted Czech-born Zuzana Princova of London's Wharton Econometrics Forecasting Associates, "yet a lot of people have trust in him and really support him." But if Walesa and Mazowiecki are to keep Poland on its historic new course, they will also need outside help -- from Washington as well as from Moscow.