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

group. RS AWS constituted the Christian-democratic line, ZChN the Christian-national and SKLthe liberal-conservative.From the beginning the organisational structure was heavily debated. Thus Aleksander Hall arguedthat AWS’ organisational structure was at the same time too odd and amorphous, because AWS wascomposed of too different and ”fictitious” organisations, resulting in several less successfulattempts to centralize decision-making. The close cooperation between workers and intellectualsthat in the 1980s gave Solidarity considerable political strength, ceased to exist both inside the tradeunion Solidarity and the electoral alliance (RS AWS). Soon after the democratic break-through,most intellectuals took the decision to join the liberal Democratic Union (UD), the later FreedomUnion (UW).At the beginning it was difficult to estimate, to what extent AWS could be reshaped and after thatconstitute a functional and disciplined party, but that was not likely to happen. Inside so broad amovement like AWS it was important, but difficult to determine the political influence of eachgroup and to single out the main political decision centres, the political core (”nurt”). After thewithdrawal of the right wing KPN from AWS the fundamentalist conservative-traditionalist factionsbecame weaker. Nonetheless, most decisions could only be taken on the central level and afterprotracted negotiations. In most cases decisions were taken according to the slogan ”the higher (inthe organisation), the more politics”, but far from all decisions were implemented at the local leveland inside each political group and “leg”. At least formally, the decision making procedures weretop-down, but this did not mean that AWS constituted a homogeneous and functional partyfederation.The political rhetorique became still more anti-communist. From the outset AWS appeared as anidentity party without consistent political programme and sufficient institutionalisation aiming tocome to power as fast as possible. The mobilization of the old Solidarity-ideals was re-activatedbefore the 1997 election. The election campaigns were moral-ideological and marked by symbolicpolitics. The strong resistance against liberal abortion rules has repeatedly been put forward, alsodemands of more support for families and approval by the parliament of the concordat with thechurch, and ”decommunisation” (”dekomunizacji”) including a purge of collaborators from the oldsystem.AWS concentrated its efforts on three policy levels: the break with the communist past, the creationof a new ”healthy” (”zdrowy”) state separating state from economy and supported by profoundpolitical, social and economic reforms. As said, subjects such as appointments of new people toimportant posts in society, abortion, decommunisation, the concordat with the church, privatisationand a new constitution were all placed high on the political agenda. Thus, the ”we versus them”distinction was still given high priority. Solidarity put forward its own proposal during thediscussions about the new constitution, that once again reflected the classical religious and“syndicalist” values. A revision of the constitution, however, was not a part of the agreement,leading to the formation of the AWS and The Freedom Union (UW) government after the 1997-election.Considering the big social and economic problems in society too little attention was paid to socialissues. Moving to more ordinary politics to dissociate oneself from the (”post-) communists” wasno guarantee of electoral success. Should Solidarity survive in the shape of a functional politicalparty federation, more “down-to-earth” political questions had to be included. The majority of the58