Only A few years separated Aleksander Kwasniewski and President Lech Walesa. But they were light years apart in terms of style and their perceptions of the concerns of the Polish electorate during the 1995 presidential campaign.
Walesa played the "red card", and tried to demonise his former communist opponent. But Aleksander Kwasniewski, a founding member of the Social Democratic Party of Poland (SDRP) after the communists dissolved in 1990, understood the new post1989 climate. Unlike Walesa, whose campaign focused on the past, halcyon days of Solidarity, Kwasniewski talked about how to secure Poland's future. Kwasniewski, more than any other post-communist politician, personified Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis.
Walesa's ideologically divided campaign failed to offer Poles any clear idea of how to deal with the massive structural problems facing the country. In contrast, a focused and tanned Kwasniewski, looking younger than his 41 years, promised continuity of market reforms and pro-western policies in an ideology-free environment. With his immaculate suits and an attractive businesswoman as his wife, he appeared to embody the kind of Poland that the new entrepreneurial class craved.
The asymmetry between Walesa and his American-style opponent was most clearly brought into focus by the allegations of corrupt business practices that have been levelled at Kwasniewski and his wife, Jolanta. While the Polish Clintons brushed off the sleaze allegations, Walesa was still dealing with charges that he had been a KGB, or CIA agent. Even when it came to scandal, Walesa was in a time warp and Kwasniewski seemed to have the advantage.
Pragmatism has been the hallmark of President Kwasniewski's presidency. He made a point of meeting the Polish Primate, Cardinal Glemp, and supported the signing of a Concordat with Rome despite the fact that this put him at odds with SDRP policy on the issue. This led to suggestions from some of his former colleagues that he was taking the notion of being a "president for all Poles" a bit too far. President Kwasniewski speaks of his twin "historical goals" of joining the EU and NATO. While belting home his main message - the desirability of Poland's return to Western Europe, which he sees as a geopolitical imperative, he is equally adamant that Poland should not abandon its eastern neighbours. He argues that Poland must act as a bridge - not as a new Iron Curtain between East and West.
On the issue of NATO's relations with Russia and those countries that will not become members in the near future, President Kwasniewski, argues that it is an "inalienable right of each nation to choose alliances and allies".
POLAND supports an "open door" for all those that are willing and can meet the requirements of Alliance membership. He speaks of a "synergetic relationship" between the completion of Poland's economic and democratic transformation and the process of integration with the rest of Europe. While many young Poles are bored by talk of heroic dissidence, show-trials, or the anti-Semitic campaigns organised by the Polish government in 1968, the memory of it remains an uncomfortable reality for older Poles, including President Kwasniewski.
Speaking at the conferring of Poland's highest award upon two of Solidarity's heroes, he condemned the events of March 1968 as a "disgraceful page of Polish history". While the incongruity of this condemnation, coming from a former communist, was not lost on the one-time dissidents gathered for the ceremony, many accepted the President's bona fides.
In a country whose history is complex, and where the paths of collaborator and dissident were often enmeshed, President Kwasniewski cut to the heart of the matter when he spoke of the "difficult lot of that part of the Polish intelligentsia which, first in the name of socialist and humanistic values, accepted the logic of the Polish People's Republic, but then in the name of those same values started an open protest against dictatorship".
Aleksander Kwasniewski did not resign from the communist party when martial law was introduced and Solidarity was suppressed in December 1981. However he did take part in the "roundtable" process which led to the collapse of communism in Poland and the rest of the Soviet bloc.
Lech Walesa will go down in popular history as the hero of the Polish revolution. It is likely that Aleksander Kwasniewski will occupy a more quiet space.
He will, perhaps, be remembered as a pragmatist who proved his party's commitment to the process of reform and understood the deep need of many Poles to leave the past behind them.
Jacqueline Hayden is a journalist and doctoral student at the Department of Political Science, Trinity College, Dublin. She is the author of Poles Apart: Solidarity and the New Poland.
