Solidarity Is Out as Poles Go to Polls

WARSAW — Poles voted Sunday to return the country’s former Communists to power in hopes they will stop the economic slide threatening the nation’s previously bright financial future.

According to exit polls, the Democratic Left Alliance was on track to win more than 44% of the vote, or more than three times the total of its closest competitor.

That would give the party a majority of seats in the 460-member lower house of Parliament and mean that it could govern without forming a coalition. However, because the final tally will not be completed until later this week, a chance remains that the party could be forced into a partnership.

About 46% of Poles went to the polls Sunday.

“Congratulations are in order for the Democratic Left Alliance. . . . They have a reason to be satisfied . . . but this will be no easy ride,” President Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former party leader, said after the poll findings were announced, referring to the difficult job the new government will face and the ideological differences between the alliance and other parties that won significant numbers of seats.

The current ruling coalition--a successor to the once widely popular Solidarity movement, which helped to overthrow communism--failed to win enough votes to control any seats in the lower house.

In contrast, three extremely conservative parties picked up votes, signaling the depth of frustration with the impact of post-Communist economic reforms on rural areas and with the political landscape.

“This should ring an alarm bell for all of us who rule. It shows that something has happened. It cannot just be explained by the difficulty of reform. . . . [These are] parties of protest, to some extent parties of frustration. This signal should not be ignored,” said Kwasniewski, widely viewed as the most popular politician in Poland.

The conservative parties that picked up votes included Self Defense, a rural populist and nationalist party that opposes economic integration with Europe. The exit polls showed it winning nearly 10% of the vote, which would make it the third-largest party in Parliament.

The Law and Justice party, which wants to see a crackdown on crime, won about 9%, according to the exit polls, while the nationalist League of Polish Families took about 6.5%.

A pro-business party known as Civic Platform came in second with at least 12% of the ballots. Among its supporters were professionals and entrepreneurs, people who once backed Solidarity and are reluctant to support former Communists.

Leszek Miller, leader of the Democratic Left Alliance, promised immediately to work hard in behalf of all Poles.

“We had a chance to win, we wanted to win, and we have won,” said Miller, who is expected to become prime minister. “But it is Poland above all that won and our program, which is giving hope to many Polish families.”

Until recently, Poland was the most vibrant of the former Communist bloc countries, with a growth rate that set it on course to join the European Union in 2004. Its entrepreneurship and openness to Western European companies had transformed its large cities into business centers and created a thriving consumer culture.

Now, however, the country faces an unemployment rate of about 16%, up a third from last year, and its growth rate has slowed to about 2%. The government is operating with a deficit of about $22 billion--or about 10% of the country’s projected gross domestic product for 2002.

The willingness of Poles to embrace the former Communists shows not only the depth of frustration with the ruling coalition but also how much politics has changed in the post-Communist period.

The former Communists no longer bring to mind Soviet-style politics but have cast themselves successfully in the image of the social democratic parties that are powerful players in many Western European countries. The Polish version of social democratic politics includes strong support for fiscal discipline and for accession to the European Union, as well as a pro-Western foreign policy.

The party and its leader have gained supporters not so much because of what they stand for as because they are not the current leadership, according to Poles who voted for them and to analysts.

“The paradox is that this party didn’t promise very much,” said Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski, a professor of sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Political Studies.

“Their electoral success is really due to the failure of the other party. Thus the former Communists are the only alternative for people disappointed with the current government,” he said.

“I voted for the Democratic Left Alliance because for me they are the people I can trust. They are credible, competent,” Tadeuisz Sewerynksi, a 50-year-old who lives on disability, said as he left a polling place in Warsaw.

Even the elderly, who lived through the economic hardships of the Communist years, feel confident that the party has truly changed.

“This is a new generation,” said Irena Cieplowska, 77, a pensioner. “They are not the same people that were in power then. . . . They are not even able to think in the old way anymore.”

The level of trust is particularly surprising because the party’s leader, Miller, was not just a rank-and-file party member but a member of Poland’s last Politburo. However, he has gone a ways toward transforming his image and his policies.

Taciturn and reserved, Miller has been careful to lower expectations and guarantee stability. During the campaign, he told attendees at one rally that they could “count on things not getting worse and then gradually getting better.”

But his party has a bumpy road ahead. In order for the country to join the EU, it would have to allow imported food to compete on the same basis as the produce from thousands of Polish family farms, and it would have to change the laws to allow land to be owned by foreigners. Both issues are deeply controversial.

Times staff writer Rubin reported from Vienna and special correspondent Kasprzycka from Warsaw.