POLAND : Walesa Striving to Keep Reform Going : He seeks a way around Parliament, where key legislation is bottled up.

The political struggle over Poland’s economic recovery plan has intensified, with new threats of strikes and moves by President Lech Walesa to grant emergency powers to the government to dislodge stalled economic legislation in Parliament.

Presidential aides say Walesa also is increasingly contemplating invoking his powers to dissolve the Parliament, which on Friday rejected his amendments to a law setting rules for parliamentary elections, now anticipated for October.

The situation for the government and for Walesa, elected president in December, is the most crucial yet, with the government seemingly on the defensive over its economic policies and certain to face criticism for “autocratic” tendencies if he dissolves Parliament.

Holding the elections has been an important issue for the government, which points out that the present Parliament was not freely elected and still contains a nearly two-thirds majority of former Communists and their allies.

The Sejm, or Parliament, passed an election law. But it was so complicated--it required three systems of vote-counting, for example--that Walesa vetoed it.

Walesa and the government say that crucial economic legislation has been bottled up in the current Sejm for months. The proposal to grant emergency powers for one year to the government of Prime Minister Jan Krzysztof Bielecki would require a constitutional amendment; Sejm leaders say that, if agreement from party leaders is obtained, the amendment could pass by mid-July.

The parliamentary logjam includes economic reform legislation on foreign investment, taxes and restructuring of the banking industry--all key measures, economists say, if Poland is to continue its progress at transforming the economy.

Until recently, Poland has been the star of the East European economic world. But it has been hard hit by the collapse of the Soviet market, which has threatened more than 100 state-run companies.

Television viewers in recent days have been treated to scenes of enraged protesters in the streets of Lodz, the hard-hit textile city whose products were sold mostly in the Soviet Union. The demonstrators have been venting their anger not at the Soviets but at Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz, architect of Polish economic reform.

Although widely hailed in the West, Balcerowicz’s plan--centered on defeating inflation by holding down wages and introducing real-market prices--has become a political issue that has unified a normally disparate group of forces.

Among them are workers, threatened by a loss of jobs; the older, Communist nomenklatura factory managers and populist political forces trying to appeal to voters by attacking Balcerowicz.

“Poles have been told for a long time that they can blame someone else for their problems,” said a Western economic analyst. “Politicians go out and say, ‘We can see you are hurting. Vote for us and we’ll make it right.’ ”

But the analyst said that despite the blow inflicted by the collapse of the Soviet market, the economy is doing “remarkably well” overall. “It looks more like a boom,” he said.