Poland: Steady On

Lech Walesa, crusading leader of Poland’s Solidarity union, who has turned moderate politician and sage in his middle years, said the other day: “In politics there is no regret. There is only calculation.” It may be that it is only calculation that prevents Solidarity from gloating in public over its humiliating defeat of Poland’s Communist Party in the recent election. The Communists, in turn, may be humble only in the most calculated way. In either case, the calculations have been correct. Only with the sort of shotgun wedding into which Poland’s economy has forced the two parties is there any hope that Polish workers will make the kinds of deliberate, as opposed to enforced, sacrifices that it will take to pull the nation out of its depression.

Leaders on both sides have understood since last August that they had no choice but to lean on each other for the strength to move Poland into the black financially. They also must know that working together is their only hope of moving Poland unscathed through the unchartable days of change in the political and power relationships at the Central European border between East and West. Since then, the question has always been whether impatient hard-liners in Solidarity and the still-dominant Communist Party would let them do what had to be done. So far so good.

Solidarity’s overwhelming victory over the Communists a week ago Sunday is now official and acknowledged. Solidarity holds 92 of 100 seats in the Senate, which has veto power over the lower house, the Sejm, and thus over the party at the legislative level. In a chivalrous gesture, Solidarity will ignore a rule to the contrary and allow Communists who lost in their bid for seats in the Sejm to try again in elections scheduled for two weeks from now. Without such a second chance, too many Communists with administrative posts, including the prime minister and the minister of defense, would have had no legitimate claim to their jobs.

The final point of the joint effort is that with Solidarity running interference at top levels for Polish citizens, workers will join with fewer reservations the effort to turn the economy around. Neither side can predict the result. That will be determined by hope--and calculation.