The Fall of Communism 1197eminent, it was the continued pitiful performance of the economy that
fatally undermined communism. In 1987, the government held a referen
dum, asking Poles to support price increases. When they were overwhelm
ingly voted down, the government imposed them anyway. Demonstrations
and strikes followed, and renewed calls to legalize Solidarity were made,
amid widespread shortages and a grotesquely inflated currency. The govern
ment could no longer meet the interest payments on its massive debt to
Western banks. General Jaruzelski had no choice but to accept some
reforms. In August 1988, the government invited Solidarity to negotiate.
The opposition agreed to participate in exchange for government recogni
tion of the legal status of Solidarity as the legitimate representative of Poles
opposed to Communist rule. Negotiations between Solidarity representa
tives and the government in 1989 led to the creation of a senate and the
position of president of Poland. In the first relatively free elections in
Poland since the immediate post-war period, Solidarity candidates swept to
victory in the Senate. In the lower chamber, negotiations had led to 65 per
cent of the seats being reserved for Communists and 35 percent for the can
didates of Solidarity. Still, General Jaruzelski confidently believed he could
orchestrate liberalization on his own terms.
Solidarity’s candidates swept to victory. The extent of Communist humili
ation was such that candidates supported by Solidarity (with the support of
the Catholic Church) won all 161 of these parliamentary seats. Moreover,
Communist candidates won only two of thirty-five seats in elections in
which they ran unopposed. When the United Peasant Party began talks with
Solidarity and left the government coalition, the Communist majority col
lapsed. The Communists could not put together a government acceptable to
Solidarity. When parliament elected Solidarity leader Tadeusz Mazowiecki
(1927— ) Poland had the first non-Communist government in Eastern Eu
rope since 1948, although Communists retained several important min
istries. However, Solidarity leaders, still wary that popular momentum once
again could lead to heavy-handed repression, supported the election by the
Polish parliament of General Jaruzelski as president.
In 1990, the Communist era ended in Poland when the Polish Commu
nist Party changed its name and espoused pluralist politics. In the wake of a
split within Solidarity between the followers of Mazowiecki and those of
Lech Walesa, the latter was elected president in December 1990. The
Democratic Union, a party formed by Mazowiecki’s followers within Solidar
ity, won the largest number of seats in the lower house and the senate. Eco
nomic reforms, aimed at introducing a full-fledged free-market economy,
were slow to take effect, however. Poland began a long struggle for economic
stability with mounting unemployment and a dramatically increased crime
rate.
In Hungary, the Hungarian Democratic Forum and several smaller
opposition groups began to emerge in 1988 out of cafe and living-room
gatherings of longtime dissidents. Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union