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Aleksander Kwasniewski, a polished Pole
Jan 7th 1999
From The Economist print edition


THESE days, in the chancelleries and conference-halls of Western Europe, suave ex-communists seem to go down a lot better than the grizzled, grumpy heroes of the cold war, who too often look better at undermining governments than at running them. Aleksander Kwasniewski, Poland’s president, once a communist apparatchik, certainly knows how to put the charm on. Witness his address to members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg at the end of last year, when he warned them of the “myths” that Poland’s detractors were spreading to delay the EU’s eastbound expansion. It was a fantasy, he assured them, that Poles would abandon their own booming economy to flood the labour markets of the west. Do not believe, he said, that Poland’s farming and industries were stuck in the stone age.

The Strasbourg audience, entranced by his fluent sincerity, gave Mr Kwasniewski a standing ovation. So much more articulate and comme il faut than that Lech Walesa. So much more, well, European.

But then Mr Kwasniewski, who toppled the old Solidarity man by a handful of votes in 1995, has always shone abroad. He gets on well with leaders of the world’s rich countries. He handles awkward eastern neighbours, such as Russians and Belarussians, with delicacy. He has favourably impressed Jewish campaigners. Though an agnostic who thinks abortion should be easily available, Mr Kwasniewski has even managed to get along with people in the Vatican, carefully distancing himself from the vitriolic anti-church rhetoric of some of his post-communist colleagues.

Indeed, Mr Kwasniewski may be forgiven for sometimes thinking how much more agreeable it is abroad than at home. There, the antipathy felt by right-wingers shows no sign of abating. They still pillory him as a communist careerist who lied his way to the presidential palace and who, to their consternation, has emerged unscathed from their efforts to pin charges of embezzlement and past pro-Russian espionage on him, not to mention an extramarital affair. Even more upsetting for the old right, he can wield a presidential veto to block continuing efforts to “de-communise” the nation—the business of exposing the crimes of the communist past and their perpetrators, and keeping all such tainted people out of public life—though one such veto was late last year overturned by parliament.

Not surprising, perhaps, given his own communist past. But Mr Kwasniewski, now 44, has long denied that he was ever a “real” communist, let alone a Marxist ideologue. “Olek”, as friends and family call him, was brought up in a poor little hamlet in that western bit of Poland which was German before the second world war. His mother was a devout Christian, his father a doctor who listened to the American-backed Radio Free Europe. At 23, Olek joined the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party, as the communists called themselves, only under pressure—he says—as a student at Gdansk University who simply wanted to get on. When, in 1981, Wojciech Jaruzelski, the general with the dark glasses, did the Kremlin’s bidding by imposing martial law and sending in tanks to crush the embryonic Solidarity movement, Comrade Kwasniewski was poised for a meteoric rise. By 1989, he was a nifty sports minister, soon brought in to negotiate on behalf of the communists at the round-table talks that took Poland back to democratic multi-party politics.

In those days, the joke was that the round table was eight metres across because the world spitting record stood at seven metres. In fact, Mr Kwasniewski was soon sharing vodka and blue jokes with legendary dissidents such as Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron. They felt he was instinctively liberal, a man to do business with. But they did not suspect that, a decade on, he would be one of the most successful politicians of Central Europe—especially after the communists’ debacle in the first democratic election, which saw Mr Kwasniewski beaten to a Senate seat by a seaside organist.

By 1993, thanks to Solidarity’s own acrimonious bust-up, he was leading back to power a revamped communist party, rebranded as social democrats on the European model. “Kwasniewski-ism” (the art of never looking back to the past, Poles chuckle) was born. Two years later, with young daughter and glamour-loving wife, he moved into the Namiestnikowski Palace, the presidential abode, promising to heal a nation whose divisions were so bitterly exposed in the campaign. Set against the harsh tongue and poor syntax of his predecessor, Mr Walesa, the nattily dressed, sound-bite-loving ex-communist looked the more modern man that the country was in need of.

But Mr Kwasniewski deserves a fair dose of credit. A number of independent-minded Poles reckon he really has governed in the name of the nation, not on behalf of old cronies. Forced into political cohabitation after the 1997 election, when a rejuvenated Solidarity movement got into government again, the president has endeared himself to many middle-of-the-road Poles by battling away for reconciliation. He says he is not against bringing the perpetrators of communist-era crimes to justice. But he is dead against banning the country’s 2m card-carrying ex-communists from public life.

And what about Mr Kwasniewski’s approach to Europe? With a series of charm offensives, which have done much to keep EU leaders sweet in the face of attacks on Brussels bossiness by prickly Polish nationalists, Mr Kwasniewski has proved himself an unswerving European, shoring up relations with Germany and trying to pacify Russian fears about NATO’s eastward expansion. More than that, he is something of a champion for his eastern neighbours. He has consistently lectured West Europeans that EU expansion should not end at Poland’s eastern borders. That may still be a pipedream. But, if he can win another term in the presidential election due next year, Mr Kwasniewski may stick around long enough at least to see the EU expand that far.