Politically, the oustanding events were the elections that took place in June 1990. The Civic Forum and the Public Against Violence, the two umbrella groups that emerged as national forces during the 1989 upheaval, won a comfortable majority of 170 in the 300-seat Federal Assembly. Although compromised by long years of collaboration with the Soviet occupier, the communists, led by the young bureaucrat Vasil Mohorita, managed to win forty-seven seats and became the second strongest political force in the country. Other parties that became prominent were the Christian Democrats, a coalition grouping the Slovak Christian Democratic Movement, the People’s Party, and the Christian Democratic Party—with forty seats—and groups representing regional, ethnic, or nationalist interests.23
Havel was reelected President for a second term in July, and Marian Calfa, who had left the communist party in January, continued to head the government. The transition as a whole proceeded far more smoothly than in the other countries. But even in Czechoslovakia, with its more developed tradition of representative democracy, the absence of a clear understanding of the role and mechanism of a party system was evident in the internecine struggle that affected both the Civic Forum and the Public Against Violence. There were many anti-authoritarian trends that simply rejected the idea of turning those large social movements into genuine political parties. In October, however, the Forum held its congress, and Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus, an economist strongly attached to the antistatist views of Friedrich von Hayek, was elected chairman. Klaus pledged to turn the Civic Forum into a dynamic, well-organized party. Upset with what they perceived as a right-wing takeover of the Forum and the formation of an Interparliamentary Group of the Democratic Right, left-wing deputies formed their own interparliamentary faction, called the Civic Association. It seemed that the differentiation of political trends within the Forum was a prelude to the reconstitution of a national political life that would include parties based on ideological affinities rather than movements committed to advocating abstract ideas. In February 1991 the tension between the left and the right within the Civic Forum reached its climax, and the movement split into two wings. One was dominated by Klaus and supported the idea of forming a “definitely right-of-center party” to contest for the 1992 parliamentary elections. Such a party did indeed emerge in the spring of 1991. The other wing, more diffuse, founded its political arm under the name of the Liberal Club, whose best-known personality was the Deputy Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and veteran Charter 77 activist Jiri Dienstbier. According to Klaus, the divergence between the two factions caused by their different political and economic philosophies. He criticized the Liberal Club for its commitment to social democratic values and for the influential role played within its ranks by former dissident communists. In order to avoid unnecessary strife over who could legitimately use the name “Civic Forum,” the two groups agreed to reserve it for a coordinating committee on which both factions would be equally represented.24 Meanwhile, Finance Minister Klaus advocated a fast privatization of the economy and managed to persuade the parliament to pass a number of laws regarding the restitution of confiscated property and state encouragement of small-scale businesses. In November 1990 the parliament supported large-scale privatization, and a new system of taxation and capital markets was designed to prevent spiraling inflation and massive social convulsions.
During this evolutionary time for the development of the political parties and a market economy, Slovak national claims continued to gather momentum. A symbolic gesture was made by the Federal Assembly in April, as the country’s previous name “the Czechoslovak Federal Republic” was changed to the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic. Decentralization proceeded quickly, with the federal government yielding many of its prerogatives to the two republics. The country was on the verge of a constitutional crisis in December 1990, when the Slovak deputies to the parliament threatened to proclaim the supremacy of Slovak laws over federal ones in protest of parliamentary attempts to change the draft constitutional amendment. Speaking on that occasion, Vaclav Havel deplored the rise of nationalistic passions and asked the Federal Assembly immediately to pass laws providing for the creation of a constitutional court and enlarged presidential powers in the case of a national emergency. Ironically, Vaclav Havel, who had always opposed any concentration of power in the hands of one person, discovered that there are moments when morality and politics reach a collision point. He discovered that ethnic animosities and hostile feelings, including rabid xenophobia, continue to exist and to poison the public atmosphere. The longdenied ethnic tensions were only the beginning of the new political problems. Getting out of the totalitarian heritage of fear, resignation, self-pity, and self-contempt involved a reconstruction of the political subject. It meant, as Vaclav Havel pointed out in his speech on the anniversary of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, a revival of the civic spirit that made possible the great upheaval of 1989:
In order to change our situation for the better we must act energetically and without delay. We should return to the days of last November at least in spirit in order to recreate the feeling of unity of purpose and desire for change, that civic courage and civic imagination which at that point proved stronger than the totalitarian structures …. We must again place the common weal above individual and party political interests. We must again act nonviolently and with tolerance, but decisively and fast, as we acted toward the end of last year when the all-powerful Communist Party obeyed the will of the people and within a few days gave up its “leading role.”25
Hungary: Disenchantment and Bitterness
In the spring of 1990 Hungarians elected a new parliament, and the former communist party suffered a crushing defeat. The Hungarian Democratic Forum won 42.9 percent of the seats, followed by the Alliance of Free Democrats with 23.83 percent and by other less powerful formations. However, during the local elections that took place in September and October, many former communist officials were reelected, suggesting that although their party had lost the national battle, there were still possibilities for them to maintain influence locally. At the same time the Alliance of Free Democrats managed to win in a number of large cities, including Budapest, where the former samizdat opposition activist Gabor Demszky became mayor. Also very interesting was the electoral success, during the local elections, of FIDESZ, the party of the young professionals and students, which seemed to symbolize the aspirations of many Hungarians for a brand new political spectrum.
Unlike Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania, where the presidency retained a strong hold in terms of political authority, in Hungary the new system provided for a decisive role of the government and the Prime Minister. It was a parliamentary rather than a presidential system. Following an agreement between the two most important parties, a Free Democrat writer and former political prisoner, Arpad Göncz, was elected the new President. The task of forming the new government was entrusted to Jozsef Antall, the chairman of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, who established a coalition with two smaller parties, the Smallholders and the Christian Democrats. One could therefore conclude that following the March and April 1990 elections, “Hungary became the only true multiparty democracy in Eastern Europe.”26 At the same time, the government showed no consistency in implementing drastic economic reform and full-fledged marketization of the country’s ailing economy. Even when privatization took place, it resulted in the sudden transformation of the former managers into capitalist bosses. That transformation created discontent among social groups that had resented the previous social stratification and who had hoped that the new political system would allow for more social justice. There were, for instance, many who shared the resentful opinion expressed by Laszlo Miklos, an engineer of a food processing firm:
Until now, we were managed by comrade Ballay, who sat in his office surrounded by statues of Lenin and pictures of comrade Kadar while Comrade Kolosznay, his secretary, brought in his customary Courvoisier to treat the comrades who came to see him. Now, it is Mr. Ballay who owns th
e firm, and he sits in his office surrounded by pictures of Mr. Bush shaking hands with him while his secretary, Mademoiselle Kolosznay, offers Courvoisier to customers in his office. The products remain the same; only the labels have changed.27
The old technocratic bureaucracy continued to manage the bankrupt factories inherited from the communist regime.
Unfortunately, while the old technocratic bureaucracy continued to operate, the differences between the Democratic Forum and the Alliance of Free Democrats continued to deepen as the economic situation deteriorated and a climate of dissatisfaction became ail-pervasive. The Forum made a point of championing the interests not only of Hungarians living in Hungary, but of all 15 million Hungarians, including the Magyar minorities living in other countries, primarily Romania and Czechoslovakia. At the same time, during the electoral campaign some intellectuals associated with the Forum engaged in attacks on the Free Democrats that were often reminiscent of the anti-Semitic outbursts characteristic of the interwar period. Although Prime Minister Jozsef Antall and Foreign Minister Geza Jeszensky took great care to emphasize the European orientation of their party, they did not emphatically repudiate such not-so-ambiguous expressions of populist ethnocentrism. The traditional conflicts between populists and urbanists tended to resurrect themselves along the same mythological and counterproductive lines as they had followed before communist rule: on the one hand idealization of Christian and Magyar values of law and order, on the other abhorrence of the cosmopolitan, Westernizing, decadent, and soulless program of the liberal intelligentsia. But that is an exaggerated picture that emphasizes the most radical expressions of their approach. An astute observer of the Hungarian scene noted in 1990 that the parties’ ideological polarization took a turn for the worse: “Venomous debates on religious education in schools, abortion, privatization, anti-Semitism, and the control of the media, and clashing assessments of the prewar Horthy regime have shattered the new parties’ fragile postelection consensus on national priorities.”28 Nevertheless, the ideological debates of the 1930s could not simply be replayed in the 1990s. The rhetoric might sound the same or very similar, but the constituencies were different. The reason for the conflict between Free Democrats and the Democratic Forum should be sought in the mutual suspicion between Budapest and the rural areas, with each party trying to expand its electoral base as much as possible.29 As the Forum resuscitated the values of the prewar right, the Free Democrats appeared increasingly as the party of modernity. In their platform they championed rapid privatization and criticized the Forum for its failure to address the nation’s most urgent problems. In October 1990 Budapest was paralyzed as a result of a taxi and truck drivers’ strike. Despite the palpable positive results of the transition period, the general mood in the country remained pessimistic. A provocative explanation came from the Prime Minister himself: “Everyone thinks our results are better than we do. A Hungarian will always see the worst. It comes in part from a peasant mentality, which will never predict a good harvest.”30 Following frequent expressions of popular anger, Antall promised to reshuffle the government and to bring in more competent people. The economy stagnated, and the general feeling was that the leading team was not prepared to propose any remedy. While Budapest looked increasingly like a prosperous Western capital, the countryside remained dramatically poor. As the economy deteriorated and political fragmentation continued, Hungary’s future was fraught with new tensions and strife. But those could occur within a democratic structure, and it seemed that all political parties agreed that a return to dictatorship was unlikely.
Toward a Polish Presidentialism?
Bitter conflict surfaced in Poland in the summer of 1990, when Lech Walesa decided to challenge the government he had helped come to power several months earlier. With harsh words and unsparing energy, Walesa took the government to task for its procrastination in dealing the coup de grâce to the communist nomenldatura. The rationale behind Walesa’s anti-Mazowiecki outburst was that the union leader did not want to accept power sharing with the communists, which was actually the constitutional principle on which the Mazowiecki government had first been formed. For Walesa and his allies, there was no reason for Poland to lag behind the other former communist regimes in ridding the government of the former nomenldatura. The presence of General Jaruzelski as the country’s President—even if it was primarily a ceremonial job—was for Walesa an anomaly in a time when the Hungarians and the Czechoslovaks had already jettisoned their communists from all positions of authority. Walesa and his supporters perceived the strategy designed by the Solidarity parliamentary caucus headed by the historian Bronislaw Geremek as unjustified: There was no reason to abide by the roundtable agreement when the whole domestic and international equation had so fundamentally changed. The time was ripe for all-out warfare against the holdovers of communism. Those who did not share his view were suspected of having crypto-leftist sympathies. Sometimes, in significant, almost Fruedian, slips of the tongue, Walesa alluded to their “imperfect” Polishness—an oblique way of reminding the electorate that some of Mazowiecki’s political friends were Jewish or of Jewish descent. The tensions between the maverick Solidarity leader and Prime Minister Mazowiecki’s team cannot be understood only in personal and psychological terms. Still, one cannot ignore Walesa’s feeling of having been marginalized by the sophisticated intellectuals of the Warsaw and Kracow circles.
Walesa seemed to be displeased with the conversion of his former allies into government bureaucrats and to dislike the leniency they showed. In order to accelerate the transition to democracy, he used his advisory council, called the Citizens’ Committee, a body established in 1987. In 1989 the Committee selected lists of candidates to run under the Solidarity banner for the Sejm and the Senate in every electoral district. In 1990 Walesa reasserted his control over this body by appointing Zdislaw Najder, a literary historian and the former head of Radio Free Europe’s Polish Service, as the new chairman. He appointed new members and replaced—by public letter—Henryk Wujek, a former close associate, as the Committee’s secretary. He also attempted to oust Adam Michnik from Gazeta Wyborcza. Insisting on his popular roots—as opposed to the alienation of the Warsaw intellectuals from the working class—Walesa summoned Prime Minister Mazowiecki to a meeting in front of the workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. Incensed at this continuous bashing, close allies of the Prime Minister made public their disagreement with Walesa’s authoritarian practices. A sharp debate developed between the daily Gaceta Wyborcza, whose editor was Michnik, the well-known historian, and Tygodnik Solidarnosc, a paper controlled by Walesa’s supporters. As the confrontation intensified between the two newspapers and groups, mutual accusations were raised and Solidarity reached a breaking point. In May 1990 the movement split into two groups, or proto-parties: Walesa’s partisans formed the Center Alliance, and in July the pro-Mazowiecki activists formed their own faction called the Citizens’ Movement—Democratic Action (Polish Acronym: ROAD).31 In their first statements, the ROAD activists accused the Center Alliance of using revolutionary methods and suggested that the slogan “acceleration” favored by Walesa and his supporters could destabilize the country and antagonize the West. Walesa was often depicted as an irrational demagogue, a populist adventurer with no sense of political compromise. ROAD chose the self-effacing Tadeusz Mazowiecki as its presidential candidate, thus almost forcing him to run for President. Among the most prominent ROAD supporters were Jerzy Turowicz, the respected editor of the Cracow Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny; two veterans of Solidarity’s heroic underground stage, Zbigniew Bujak and Wladyslaw Frasyniuk; and Adam Michnik.
The Center Alliance argued that because of the hesitations shown by Mazowiecki and his team Poland had become bogged down in the transitory stage between communism and democracy. The Alliance rejected ROAD’s claim that it embodied the “ethos of Solidarity” and made clear that it saw itself as the inheritor of the independent union’s best traditions. According to Jacek Maziarski, an e
ditor of Tygodnik Solidarnosc and one of the Alliance’s foremost partisans, both the program and the activities of this party
… follow from the fundamental tradition of Solidarity, identified neither with the Polish Left (which borders on social democracy and recruits its adherents from among scientists, journalists, artists, et al), nor the Polish Right. The Center Alliance is trying to prevent a head-on collision of leftand right-wing tendencies by establishing a solid political majority located between the two extremes.32
The ROAD spokesmen, in turn, rejected the label “leftist” attached to their party by the pro-Walesa spokesmen. ROAD claimed that it drew its inspiration from the East European civic and democratic movements of the 1970s and 1980s. ROAD also took credit for having initiated shock therapy, an economic strategy that could not be suspected of any leftist propensity. On various occasions, ROAD representatives insisted that their party was the true guarantor of Poland’s integration in the democratic family of European nations and proclaimed that their group was “West of Center.” Asked about the meaning of that slogan, Zbigniew Bujak, a legendary figure who had run the Solidarity underground after the Martial Law, declared: “We are for the rule of law and parliament, for judicial independence, etc., against any methods which might threaten our democratic achievements …. One cannot disentangle oneself from totalitarianism by applying undemocratic methods.”33 The conflict between the two trends also had a deeper source, namely a difference over the identity of the main danger to Poland’s fragile democracy: The Center Alliance saw communist restoration as a real threat and pushed for an immediate and uncompromising purge of the nomenklatura from all the government offices, while ROAD pointed to ethnocentric populism and demagogy as the most serious menace. Adam Michnik, for instance, called Walesa “a danger to the nation” and argued that the Solidarity leader, with all his skills as a popular tribune, did not have the qualifications for being President in a democratic state. According to Michnik, Walesa’s “political ideal is a job where he holds all power and bears no responsibility.”34 Bujak echoed those dismissive views of Walesa when he stated that the Center Alliance’s “empty populism” had magnetized nationalist emotions: “Because of this nationalist point of view, they [the Center Alliance] aren’t able to build a political movement that connects Poland to the West. ROAD will be the party which brings Poland to Europe.”35
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