ABSTRACT
Introduction Although they are felt to be a central feature in the functioning of nearly every contemporary democracy, political parties have often conjured up negative images in Poland. For example, much of the blame for the failure of the Polish inter-war Second Republic to deliver national integration and unity in its early years was laid at the door of its incoherent party system and fragmented parliament. In 1925 there were no fewer than 92 registered political parties of whom 32 were represented in the Sejm, the more powerful primary chamber of the Polish parliament, organized into 18 political clubs (Leslie 1980). Consequently, many Poles shared their interwar semi-authoritarian leader Marshall Pilsudski’s dislike of party politics, which he pejoratively dubbed ‘Sejmocracy’, and supported his 1926 military coup that brought to an abrupt end a brief period of liberal democratic politics.1 The communist period and the various forms of political organization and behaviour that it promoted re-inforced these existing negative pre-conceptions of political parties. Forty years of one-party rule discredited not just the ruling communist party, but also the whole notion of party politics. It was not surprising, then, that the anti-communist Solidarity opposition movement was imbued with an ethos of ‘anti-politics’ and emerged within the framework of a trade union and social movement (for instance Ost 1990). The fact that the 1989-90 democratic transition process was dominated by a unified, non-party form of political organization, therefore, appeared to accord well with established Polish preferences. However, it also helped to ensure that the process of party development in post-1989 Poland was tortuous, and characterized by high levels of instability and electoral volatility. Initially at least, Solidarity, like the other East European political conglomerates that oversaw the democratic transitions and dominated the first phase of post-communist politics, displayed little interest in transforming itself into a political party (for instance, Kiss 1992).
