Rampant Apathy As Poles Go To The Polls
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday June 2, 1989
WITH the freest elections in half a century tomorrow, the strongly pro-Solidarity city of Wroclaw, is taking Poland's plunge into democracy in its stride.
Among the many educated people, there is a palpable apathy stemming from weariness with Poland's seemingly infinite spirals of mounting political struggles and a falling standard of material life.
"I really don't think I'll vote," said a 36-year-old teacher of Polish whose two sons are aged one and three.
"I don't know enough. Today I stood in line for three hours at the butcher's. Standing in line for everything leaves me no time." She said her husband, an engineer, would probably vote for Solidarity.
Candidates for the two houses of the next Parliament are addressing small, indoor gatherings for sober question-and-answer sessions in this young city of many institutions of higher education, rather than drawing crowds to rallies.
Solidarity banners are more visible than those of the Communist Party, but most candidates have contented themselves with small handbills stuck to walls
"We are spitting against the wind," said Janusz Pawlikowski, a provincial party secretary, assessing the party's meagre chances against what he called Solidarity in the ascendancy. "You would have to be a strong spitter."
The senior party official was speaking in his office at party headquarters, a remarkably quiet place for this late state of the campaign.
Except for a few men stacking posters, which seemed more plentiful inside headquarters than about town, the visible activity would have been appropriate to preparations for a bridge tournament.
Pawlikowski, a 46-year-old physics professor who has taught at the University of Delaware, made no bones about the Communists' dim view of their chances.
"For the first time we are not trying to get a big turnout," he said. "We think it means a big turnout against us. Party members are disciplined and will vote for us. How about the rest? The rest should sit home."
Antoni Gucwinski, one of the party's candidates for Wroclaw's two Senate seats, said: "The party has stepped back a little; it doesn't make much ado. But it supports its members." Gucwinski was interviewed in his home at the city zoo, of which he is the director.
The party has in fact stepped back so far that it is not named as the organisation that nominated its candidates.
Gucwinski's election posters are printed in ecological green rather than traditional party red, and proclaim him the candidate of the Association for the Dissemination of Knowledge.
He said he has long been a lecturer for that organisation and is also, together with his wife, a nationally popular television personality as host of a program on animals.
Gucwinski said he was seeking office for the first time because he has long dealt with environmental questions that are of rising importance, and he knows nature.
Directing a zoo, the veterinarian and zoologist said, is like working in "a living laboratory".
"We do an autopsy on every animal that dies," he continued. "The main reason I am a candidate is that I have made so many scientific analyses. Psychologically, we are also mammals."
Petting a baby tiger that he is raising at home, together with two young monkeys, he said: "If they don't vote for me, I'll turn him loose."
His main Solidarity opponent, Karol Modzelewski, a historian and one of the movement's national leaders, said Gucwinski's nomination indicated that the party's aim was to try to win seats by presenting personalities rather than political ideas.
"He is pleasant and his animals even more so," he said, in a quiet corner of Solidarity's bustling headquarters. "He was chosen for those voters who have no political knowledge but know only television personalities.
"We don't have many good candidates," Pawlikowski said of the 23 who are contesting the 13 Sejm, or Lower House, and two Senate seats. He singled out Modzelewski as an exception.
Modzelewski, who spent years in prison for his Solidarity activities, has been singled out also for an anonymous and obscene leaflet campaign, which he suspects the secret police of instigating.
The tracts describe and caricature him as a Jew, which to some in Poland amounts to a denunciation. The candidate said that his mother was "of Jewish origin".
Despite the energetic activity at Solidarity headquarters, Wladyslaw Frasyniuk, another top leader of the union, spoke glumly in comparing the union today with that of its heyday in 1980-81.
While predicting a Solidarity sweep, Frasyniuk said it was easier to get people to vote for Solidarity candidates than to make them activists, as they were before martial law was imposed in 1981.
"There is a tiredness in society," he said, in an interview at a friend's house. "Seven years of propaganda have effectively indoctrinated people into thinking that political activity leads to repression, like losing their jobs.
Modzelewski said, "They want to tell the 'little people' that their future is menaced by anarchy. They appeal to nostalgia for law and order."
Frasyniuk said there were only 200,000 Solidarity members in the province of Lower Silesia, compared with 1 million in 1981. He said he hoped that by the end of the year Solidarity nationally would number 5 million to 6 million members, compared with 10 million in 1981.
On Swidnicka, the main street as it was in 1945, when Wroclaw (pronounced Vro-tslaff) was the German city Breslau, political activity runs high but is limited to marginal Independent candidates.
A representative of the "Orange Alternative" has conferred on himself the rank of major and presents himself as the "orange major" and an alternative to the "red general", an allusion to General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the president and Communist leader.
Janusz Korwin-Mikke advertised himself as a strongly anti-communist, Reaganite candidate under a poster that proclaimed, "Our Reagan is younger".
An anti-corruption campaigner opposite the 13th-century Gothic City Hall cited sums that he said proved politicians were stealing but was put down by an angry listener.
In fact, even party and pro-party candidates who people sarcastically call"Independent Bolsheviks" are unsparing in their criticisms and, like Pawlikowski, find little in the party's record to praise.
In her one-and-a-half room apartment, the teacher of Polish and her mother and mother-in-law spoke with deep feeling, after an assurance of anonymity, of their despair over the disparity between politics and its results.
"Our future has no perspective," she said. "There were moments of hope once, but we've been fooled. We can't see it getting better.
"Standing in the butcher store today, we talked, women who didn't know one other before, but we agreed on one conclusion: until this system changes, there is no hope."
© 1989 Sydney Morning Herald