The fragmentation of Poland's political party system

Abstract

When Solidarity’s grand political coalition that had led the movement to its triumph in 1989 began what would be an irreversible process of disintegration by the end of the same year and when in 1990, the Mazowiecki and Walesa factions’ attempts to rebuild something resembling a scaled down version of a grand coalition failed, the Polish political party system began to take shape. The inability of the dominant post-Solidarity political factions to arrive at a compromise and to forge a governmental coalition resulted in the emergence of a rather paradoxical political arrangement. After a decade of spearheading political change in the Soviet-bloc countries, Poland’s transitional political institutions now seemed to lag behind developments elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Although the new president, Lech Walesa, gained office after winning a popular democratic election, the powers of his office were largely undefined’ or were roughly outlined by “round table” agreements that quickly became obsolete2 because of the collapse of the communist system and the subsequent dissolution of the communist party (PZPR) that was a signatory to the agreements. Moreover, it had been on the basis of these agreements that the partially pre-arranged and only partially democratic June, 1989, parliamentary elections had been conducted.3 As a reflection of these developments, already in 1990, the parliament had begun to be contemptuously labeled the “contract” parliament’ and was considered absolutely unsuitable for the task of designing a new constitution that would solve the fundamental questions of g0vernance.j Consequently, the “contract” parliament was a very weak institution, and was malleable in the hands of Poland’s dominant political quarters, including the president, his prime minister, the church and even the more dynamic of the emerging political parties.” Moreover, since it had been the president and not parliament that had provided the true