THE SOLIDARITY DECADE 503still have left Solidarity in a largely 'decorative' position. But then Kwasniewski
came up with the idea that the second chamber of the Assembly, the Senate,
might be subject to completely free elections. The Solidarity side began to be
seriously tempted, whilst Kwasniewski's colleagues took fright. A long stand-
off occurred before the free Senate idea returned as a definite offer. The
Solidarity negotiators could see that their counterparts were desperate for a
settlement. So their tactic was to indicate acceptance of the revised proposals
subject to agreement on a long list of auxiliary concessions. In the end they
achieved far more than they could ever have dreamed of. Not only was
Solidarity to be re-legalized, but thirty-five per cent of the Sejm and all seats in
the Senate were to be opened to free election. And that was only the start. The
freely elected Senate was to possess the right of veto on all legislation. Solidarity
was to enjoy both legal access to the media and the right of publishing its own
Gazeta Wyborcza or 'Electoral Newspaper' - only the second independent
broadsheet (after the Catholic Tygodnik Powszechny) in the history of the PRL.
All independent artistic and professional organizations closed down during
martial law were to be re-registered. All political activists deprived of employ-
ment since 1981 were to be re-employed. Most important, perhaps, though
often forgotten, a declaration was made to the effect that within four years at
the latest all elections in Poland were to be completely free. Everyone knew that
the Communist ethos permitted the breaking of inconvenient promises. None
the less, as things stood the limited elections of 1989 were to be conducted as a
first step toward greater democracy to come. The agreement was signed on 5
April. Solidarity was legally re-registered two weeks later. To let the world
know of their success, Walesa and his aides travelled to Rome to receive the
public blessing of the Pope.
The Polish elections of 4 June 1989 proved to be an unprecedented sensation.
After all, with only one-third of the Assembly up for election, there was no
chance that the PZPR could have been voted out of power. Yet the psychologi-
cal impact was shattering. In the first round of voting, Solidarity headed the list
in 252 out of the 261 seats where they could compete. Still more exhilarating was
the fact that, in the closed section of the electoral list where Solidarity was not
allowed to compete, only two out of thirty-five Communist-sponsored candi-
dates passed the test. An old rubric, which said that every candidate had to
obtain fifty per cent approval, had been formulated in times when the
Communist-machine could engineer a ninety+ per cent result. It was now used
by uninhibited voters to strike out with relish almost every Communist-spon-
sored name from their voting papers. In the first free voting since 1939 - or pos-
sibly since 1926 — support for the Communists was shown to lie somewhere
between three and four per cent. On the very same day, the Chinese Communist
government perpetrated the massacre of Tiananmen Square.
In the second round of voting two weeks later, every Solidarity candidate
for the Sejm except one was a confirmed winner. (The one loser, in the town
of Pila (formerly Schneidermiihl), was unique in that he had failed to have his