Who Would Have Thought…?
Who would have thought that Poland in 1995 would have chosen the former communist bureaucrat, Aleksander Kwasniewski, over the former hero Lech Walesa, who, along with the Solidarity movement, led Central and Eastern Europe out of Communism?
Poland still has a post Communist president, as do most post communist European countries today, and our taxi driver, who has two university educated children, frowns when I mention this…”I don’t like!” he spats. He and his wife have a two-room apartment with a monthly rent of $200. Fewer tourists come to Poland in winter, so what he makes in the summer has to stretch year round. He has his old white Mercedes with 500,000 miles on it to maintain. (He didn’t laugh when Bob pointed to a bright orange car and suggested he paint his car the same color! “I don’t think so!” Urban dwellers in apartments pay very high taxes which rural people in their own homes do not pay and food is more expensive than in the country where people grow most of their own. But he is fortunate, he says, that in school, children are rewarded for good grades by not having to pay as much tuition…those with the highest grades are rewarded with full scholarships.
So even though it is more expensive to live in the city, where the communist government sponsored “milk bars” (with simple but wonderful home-cooked food) are now few and far between. The effects of economic growth are more visible there than in the country where Walesa surprisingly lost most of his support.
And for the young, communism and Solidarity are already ancient history…something they learn about from boring textbooks. In contrast to the uneducated electrician, who often appeared undignified and used ungramatical Polish, the smooth-talking yuppielike former communist appeared more modern and forward looking. And for some young voters, there was an element of conscious revolt, just because the parents identify so strongly with the post-Solidarity tradition, the children vote against it…a pattern we saw also in the former East Germany and the Czech Republic where, for example, the young waitress who went to school with her Prime Minister, says that it is popular now to study Russian as well as English in school. So Walesa lost 48% to Kwasniewski’s 51% with an amazing 68% voter turnout.
For one thing, postcommunist parties inherit nationwide organizations, offices and funding…one of the reasons why communists gave up political power so quietly, according to my down-time reading of Timoth Garton Ash. “The result was a new class of communists turned capitalist. Also former communists have the habits and discipline for patient, boring political groundwork, which former dissidents and intellectuals generally do not. There are people slightly lower down the communist hierarchy who very rapidly adapted to the techniques of acquiring and exercising power in a modern television democracy. After all, these were people that joined the Party in the 1970’s not because they believed in communism but because they were interested in making a career.
In the electorate they have a hard core of the old faithful Then they pick up votes from those who have suffered from the transition to a market economy: the unemployed, workers in large state-owned factories, the middle-aged and small-twon dwellers who have difficulty adapting to new ways and impoverished pensioners. In Poland with the fastest growing economy (and fastest-walking pedestrians!) in all Europe, you won’t catch the post comunists talking about the “working masses” says Ash. They want desperately to be seen as regular Western social democrats.” And indeed…Poland is now a liberal democracy in the European Union and you can’t tell the difference in the immigration lines at the airport between Poles and their Western European counterparts in dress and hairstyles or the looks of the shops, sophisticated industrial-design cafes…and above all else the ever-present mobile phone.
“When people had the basic, minimal security afforded by a police welfare state, they longed, says Ash. Post communists promise that the state will provide more housing, employment and social security while preserving the gains of freedom and the market.” (Where have we heard this all before?”) Everyone we have talked to about this, from taxi drivers to hotel workers to English speaking locals in cafes, say that economically life for them was better under communism…not everyone understands the “bite the bullit” Thatcher-like tightening that is needed in a transition to democracy and free market economy and long term economic health…but none of them wants to lose hard-won peace and freedom either. And there you have it.
I wonder how this pattern will work itself out in Afphanistan and Iraq… In the August 29 edition of “New Europe,” an English language newspaper printing “Essential Business, Political and Financial News From Across New Europe” Timothy Garten Ash, who is a British journalist and historian, has an article in which he argues that “if after a bruising 30 months of national debates and referendums, the constitutional treaty [of European Union members] finally comes into force at the end of 2006, [even with a thumbs down by France,] Europe will only be at the starting line of every race that counts: the 100m sprint to provide a credible alternative to US unilateralism; the 1,000m race to foster reform in the wider Middle East before that region’s troubles bring car bombs to all our front doors; the 5,000m race to become competitive against the rising economic powers of Asia; the marathon we must start running now if we are to prevent global warming spiralling out of control…otherwise, in 2024, as our then grown-up children leave their small, highly fortified apartments and drag their way through the boiling heat or the blackened snow (and if anyone doubts the reality of global warming they haven’t talked to Russian entrepreneurs who, we are told, are already planning for global warming so they can begin growing food in the northern reaches of Russia and the Arctic!) as they dodge the nationalist gangs fighting with immigrants on the other side of the street; as they then queue up for hours to beg a half time job from the local Chinese employer; so they will turn to us and ask: ‘What did you do in the Great Peace, Daddy?
Tags: Europe, Poland, Reading, World Watching And Politics
Zoe
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