Mosaiko

How a Partially Free Election Altered Poland

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The famous image of Hollywood star Gary Cooper from the 1952 western “High Noon” was used during the Polish elections of June 1989, with Cooper sporting a “Solidarity” badge in his lapel. But the true hero in the election, which brought down Poland’s Communist regime, was not a town sheriff killing the bad guys, but the civil society organizations whose dozen years of patient work were bearing fruit. This work started in 1975 when intellectuals defended workers imprisoned for a strike and created the Workers’ Defense Committee, KOR.

KOR trained and prepared Polish workers introducing them to their own rights; when a strike broke out in 1980 in the Gdansk shipyard, they successfully demanded the creation of Solidarity, the first free trade union in the Soviet bloc. As the Communist regime had always suppressed most other segments of Polish civil society, Solidarity emerged as an umbrella organization representing many civil society currents. The regime found it necessary to engage Solidarity in a round table discussion. A bargain was made to hold a partly free parliamentary election, the regime reserving for itself 65 percent of the seats in the lower house.

With 10 million members — almost one third of Poland’s population — Solidarity was probably one of the most popular per capita movements in the world’s history, and yet the result of the election was difficult to foretell because there were no opinion polls that one could trust. I was working then at the opposition’s, i.e. Solidarity’s, daily newspaper, aptly called Gazeta Wyborcza or Electoral Gazette. On election day, June 4, 1989, Solidarity was far from sure of winning. But we were very well prepared for the battle at the ballot box.

The Communists had been cheating their own people for several decades so there was the expectation that they would do the same at these elections. For decades, civil society groups such as an informal “Flying University,” clandestine publishing houses, theater ensembles that performed in churches, and ad hoc groups of sociologists or economists opposed the policies of the regime. These groups helped prepare a whole parallel society through underground education, publications, cultural events, sociological studies, and proposals for economic recovery. So civil society was ready for the challenge of this partly free ballot. Although there were no nongovernment organizations per se, the joke went that “the only nongovernment entities in Poland are the Communist rulers.”

The electoral slogans were entirely positive because civil society had to prove that it was nobler, and also because the hatred of the Communists needed no fuelling. The most famous was a catchy song “So that Poland be Poland” (i.e., not a Soviet satellite country), and of course the memorable type font, which depicted the word “Solidarity” as a tight crowd marching with a flag.

Civil society’s access to state television was restricted, and the regime surrounded Solidarity’s few advertisements with spots designed to mislead, to confuse citizens into ultimately voting for a candidate other than the one they meant to cast their ballots for. We knew this, so we distributed little reminders: “If you are with Solidarity, cross out everyone but these” — and the names of our candidates followed. We were only partly surprised when the regime found people of the same last names as our candidates and ran them as Communist candidates for the same seats.

We expected that the Communists would play dirty, so we told Solidarity’s electoral observers to carry flashlights, lest the Communists cut off the power and stuff the ballot boxes — and extra pens, lest officials claim they had none so people could not vote.

My own role was minimal but very telling: I was on the “toilet-visit-relay-squad.” We visited all the voting stations in one district, allowing the Solidarity observer to go to the toilet. This way we made sure that authorities were not stuffing ballot boxes during the observer’s brief absence. It was a tiny contribution to prevent the Communists from cheating us once more, but I’m very proud of it.

After Solidarity’s victory, came the dissolution of the Communist Party and democratic reforms swiftly followed. Repressive departments in the Ministry of Interior — of “fight against the intellectuals,” “fight against the Church,” “fight against trade unions” and “fight against disobedient peasants” — were abolished, and local elections in spring 1990 were free and fair. At the end of the year, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa — a man who collaborated with intellectuals, was supported by the church, headed a trade union and cooperated with disobedient peasants — was elected president by the Polish people. But for me the June 1989 election remained a crucial turning point. When it was announced that Solidarity took all but one seat it was allowed to compete for, I could see why: The entire society had become a civil society.