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Poland The Bielecki Government
Upon taking office in December 1990, Walesa offered the
post
of prime minister to Jan Olszewski, a respected attorney
who had
defended prominent dissidents in the 1960s and 1970s and
who had
a long association with Solidarity. When Olszewski
rejected the
offer because of Walesa's insistence on controlling key
cabinet
positions, Walesa offered the position to Jan Bielecki,
the
leader of a small reformist party, the Liberal-Democratic
Congress. Believing that this would be a short-lived
interim
government, Bielecki accepted and conceded to Walesa the
right to
oversee cabinet selection. The new government retained
several
key members of the Mazowiecki cabinet. Leszek Balcerowicz
continued to coordinate economic policy, and the widely
respected
Krzysztof Skubiszewski remained in charge of foreign
affairs.
By his involvement in forming the Bielecki government,
Walesa
expanded the ill-defined powers of the presidency. His
resolve to
be an activist president caused alarm in the parliament,
intellectual circles, and the press. Some people accused
Walesa
of harboring ambitions to attain the powers of Józef
Pilsudski,
the strong-willed leader in the interwar years
(see Interwar Poland
, ch. 1). Although he vigorously denied such
charges,
Walesa's popularity plunged in early 1990 as his prime
minister
failed to deliver the promised acceleration of economic
reform
and improvement of government services. During his tenure,
Bielecki made little headway in privatizing large state
enterprises and dismantling the managerial bureaucracy
left by
the communists.
By the summer of 1990, factionalism and the
obstructionism of
remaining communist legislators prevented the Sejm from
enacting
major legislation sponsored by the Bielecki government.
Therefore, with Walesa's support, Bielecki asked the Sejm
to
revise the constitution and grant the prime minister
authority to
issue economic decrees with the force of law. The proposal
was
defeated, and the gridlock between executive and
legislative
branches continued.
Walesa grew increasingly resentful of the political,
institutional, and legal constraints placed on his office.
He
felt especially encumbered by the composition of the Sejm,
which
opposed much of his economic agenda. Therefore, Walesa
called for
parliamentary elections in the spring of 1991 to install a
fully
democratic Sejm. Because his timetable could not be met, a
long
power struggle between the Sejm and the president over
parliamentary election legislation ensued, and Walesa
sustained a
major political defeat. The president had favored an
election law
that would end the fragmentation of the Sejm by fostering
large
parties and coalitions. However, the parties formerly
allied with
the communists joined other anti-Walesa factions in the
Sejm in
enacting a system that allocated seats in strict
proportion to
candidates' percentages of the total vote in thirty-seven
multimember electoral districts. Such a system, Walesa
rightly
feared, would enable dozens of minor and regional parties
to win
seats in the parliament by receiving only a few thousand
votes.
Data as of October 1992
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