Development of Parties and Party Systems in ... - lah@sam.sdu.dk

Furthermore, the polarisation on elite level do not necessarily reflect the dominant cleavages insociety. After three year with post-communism almost half of the Polish population was dissatisfiedwith the way Polish democracy was conducted and a majority also disagreed with the interferenceof church in politics. In most cases the protests were expressed as demands about replacement ofindividual politicians, not as a rejection of the principle about democracy as the “best possiblesolution”. In other words, the specific support to democracy and democratic institutions was low,but the diffuse support relatively high.At the beginning party members, party leaders and local structures did not play a significant role inthe parties’ communication strategies. The political leaders in general considered the mass media asmore effective means of contacting voters than relying on party members (Szczerbiak, 2001:114).Institutionally there was small evidence that the new Polish parties were attempting to encapsulatetheir supporters by developing networks of ancillary structures directly linked to their partyorganisations, e.g. youth, women's and ecological sections (Szczerbiak, 2001:111). New Polishparties seemed to be strongest at the level of state institutions and also appeared capable of fulfillingtheir role in terms of structuring elections, institutions and recruiting elites (Szczerbiak, 2001:126).The Pasants Party (PSL) has been the only party with a rural base and left wing SdRP the only partywith an organizational network in big as well as small towns. The new parties such as. the FreedomUnion (UW) and AWS seemed to bear a closer resemblance to the catch-all, electoral-professionaland cartel parties than traditional mass parties. The new movement parties in the CEECs had notinherited the initial membership, organisational base and level of party identification that Westernparties had accumulated having operated in a competitive electoral environment in many years(Szczerbiak, 2001:124).As noted above, in the late 1990s numerous ad hoc coalitions and electoral alliances have emerged,e.g. AWS and ”Przymierze Polski”. A change toward a more bipolar and moderate multipartysystem with stronger linkages to social cleavages in society could be observed with the centre-leftparty federation (SLD) and the centre-right party federation (AWS) constituting the two main poles.The situation changed strikingly in 2000-2001, i.e. after the 2000 presidential election and, notleast, after the parliamentary election in September 2001. In the same decade, only three parties ranfor election under the same party label. Party leaders moved to “neighbour parties”, often severaltimes and mostly for personal career. The voters preferences tended to be rather stable, but not theparties. Thus, parties, that obtained about 30 pct of the votes at the 2001 election, simply did notexist in 2000, i.e. inly one to two years back in time. After the 2001 election we were basically backin the situation before the 1993 election, however, with an even stronger populist and xenophobicparty representation in the Sejm. More than 20 parties in opposition to SLD at the 1991 election, didnot exist 10 years later.After the 2001 election the SLD-UP-PSL government did obtain the majority in the Sejm due to themove toward a strict proportional election system more favourable for small parties, thereby makingthe establishment of government with a majority behind in parliament more complicated comparedwith the situation after the previous election. In return, there was support from a “post-communist”president (Aleksander Kwasniewski) and a majority of SLD-UP and PSL in the upper house(Senate). However, in general Polish politics became clearly more unstable due to the strongerrepresensation in parliament of “anti-system” parties like Samoobrona and the Leage of PolishFamilies (LPR)46