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Poland PZPR and Successor Parties
During the 1980s, the Marxist underpinnings of the PZPR
steadily eroded, and, long before the round table talks,
the
ruling party had lost its ideological fervor. Official
PZPR
documents compiled in May 1987 revealed that only about 25
percent of the membership were politically active, more
than 60
percent paid their dues but were inactive, and 15 percent
did not
even pay their dues. By that time, protecting the national
interest had replaced Marxist doctrine as the guiding
principle
of the government's actions.
For example, the Jaruzelski regime characterized its
imposition
of martial law in 1981 not as an attempt to restore
Marxist
purity but as a preemptive measure to avoid Soviet
military
intervention in Poland. The PZPR had accepted the
necessity of
economic decentralization, privatization, and price
liberalization, realizing that to regain political
legitimacy it
had to win the cooperation of the opposition.
Despite its enormous advantage in institutional and
monetary
resources, control of the electronic media and most print
media,
and a slate of reformist, nonideological candidates, the
PZPR
suffered an overwhelming defeat in the parliamentary
elections of
June 1989. Once the parties that were its traditional
allies had
repositioned themselves with Solidarity to install a
noncommunist
government, the PZPR had become a political relic. In
January
1990, at its final congress (the eleventh), the PZPR
patterned
itself after Western social democratic parties and adopted
the
name Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland
(Socjaldemokracja
Rzeczypospolitej Polski--SdRP).
The SdRP, which inherited the assets and infrastructure
of
the PZPR, was a political force that could not be ignored
in the
reform era. During the 1990 presidential elections, for
example,
the SdRP candidate received 9 percent of the vote. At its
first
national convention in May 1991, the party adopted a
platform
supporting pluralistic democracy, a parliamentary form of
government, strict separation of church and state, women's
rights, environmental protection, the right to work, a
generous
social safety net, and good relations with all of Poland's
neighbors. In July 1991, preparing for the October
parliamentary
elections, the SdRP invited other groups with a communist
lineage
to join it in a broad coalition, the Alliance of the
Democratic
Left (Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej--SLD). The most
important of
these groups was the All-Polish Alliance of Trade Unions
(Ogólnopolskie Porozumienie Zwiazków Zawodowych--OPZZ),
which
Jaruzelski had created in 1984 to co-opt Solidarity's
influence
among the working people. By the time of the 1991
elections, the
OPZZ had a larger membership than Solidarity. Of the 390
SLD
candidates for the parliamentary elections of October
1991, 45
percent were members of the SdRP and about one-third
belonged to
the OPZZ. The SLD surprised most political observers by
finishing
a close second to the Democratic Union and winning sixty
Sejm and
four Senate seats. Its failure to expand its membership,
however,
made the SLD a political outcast in the coalition-building
efforts that followed the 1991 election.
Data as of October 1992
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