Krzaklewski, into the Solidarity Electoral Action
(AWS) and emerged from the elections of
September 1997 as the single biggest party, with
33.8 per cent of the vote. The ruling Democratic
Left Alliance also increased their support to 27.1
per cent of the vote but the coalition partners, the
Peasant Party, which had gained little from market
reform, lost heavily. The new AWS, which in-
cluded elements of the anti-communist right and
the religious party, formed an uneasy coalition
with the Freedom Union, which is both secular
and keenly free-market. Krzaklewski and the com-
promise prime minister of the coalition will find it
hard to keep a government composed of so many
diverse elements on a reformist track.
In the mid-1990s Poland had forged ahead,
earning the title of central European tiger. The
pace markedly slowed as the century drew to a
close exposing more starkly the problems Poland
was still confronting, a health service badly
strained, the need for better schools and the infra-
structure of roads and railways. With the world
economy in slow growth and especially the
Germans in the doldrums, the new millennium
has been a grimmer time, foreign investment
trailed off. What has been remarkable about Polish
politics is their broad consensus. The main parties
are rooted in Poland’s communist past, the AWS
and Freedom Union grew out of Solidarity and
Democratic Left Alliance out of the communist
Polish United Workers Party. Both adopted prag-
matic policies differing mainly in emphasis –
agreed on democracy, a pro-Western alignment,
desiring US involvement in Europe and support
for Poland, in favour of joining the European
Union, a market economy, though Democratic
Left Alliance aims at a more gradual pace less
harsh in its effect on the people. Since joining the
European Union on 1 May 2004 Poland’s econ-
omy, after three years of little progress, sharply
increased. Farm subsidies and higher agricultural
prices were a stimulus but prices for consumers
also increased and unemployment remained a
problem. On the political scene the reeling social-
ist party split, Leszek Miller resigned and Marek
Belka in May became prime minister heading a
minority government which struggles on in the
absence of a stable coalition.
Kádár’s regime in Hungary had since the late
1960s placed economic reforms, rising living stan-
dards, more choice and greater freedoms in the
forefront of its policies. The softer image of
the Communist Party, whose leading role could
not be challenged, reconciled the majority of the
people to the limited options it permitted. Kádár
projected himself as the leader who knew how far
he could go without risking a repeat of the Soviet
invasion of 1956. The 1968 New Economic
Mechanism, as the mixture of central planning and
market-oriented policies was called, seemed to
work for a while. Four years later, there was some
backtracking to a planned economy. Goulash
communism was kept going by increasingly heavy
foreign credits – and so debts. By the mid-1980s,
Hungary’s economy was showing every sign of
sickness. Kádár’s reforms were too cautious.
Communist Party dominance of economic plan-
ning blocked any genuine market-oriented course.
Kádár at heart was a communist who wanted to
make communism work, not a pragmatic market
economist or a believer in democracy. Even so,
communist power dragged on.
In May 1988, the party itself got rid of Kádár,
and the reformist communist prime minister
Károly Grósz replaced him. Grósz banked on a
more efficient authoritarian communist system to
pull Hungary out of its economic stagnation. But,
for an opposition within the party led by Imre
Pozsgay, this did not constitute any real break
with Kádárism. Pozsgay raised the ghost of Imre
Nagy, who, he declared, had not led a counter-
revolution but had put himself at the head of a
national uprising. The issue involved a repudiation
of Kádár’s claim to legitimacy and to the party’s
claim that Nagy had been wrong to espouse a
multi-party political system. In June 1988, the
remains of Nagy were reinterred with honour.
Henceforth the Communist Party was deeply
divided between reformers and conservatives.
The opposition parties were equally split bet-
ween the liberal, urban and intellectually led Alli-
ance of Free Democrats and the populist Hungar-
ian Democratic Forum, which claimed to defend
the ordinary man and the small farmers and peas-
ants of the countryside. As in Poland, where anti-
intellectual and anti-Semitic sentiments during the
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