Poland's semi-free elections end communist rule

On June 4, 1989, Poles voted in the first partly free parliamentary election in the Soviet bloc. The Communist regime had agreed to the vote at the Round Table talks of February to April 1989, but only a limited share of seats was open. All 100 seats in a new Senate and 35 percent of the seats in the lower house, the Sejm, were freely contested, while the rest were reserved for the Communist Party and its allies. Solidarity, the independent trade union led by Lech Wałęsa, won all 161 Sejm seats it was allowed to contest and 99 of the 100 Senate seats. The Communists were stunned.¹

The deal was the result of nearly a decade of pressure. Solidarity had been born in the 1980 Gdańsk strikes, was crushed by martial law in 1981 and survived underground with the support of the Catholic Church. By 1988 Poland's economy was failing and new strikes shook the government. At the same time Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms made clear that the Soviet Union would not send tanks to rescue allied regimes. General Wojciech Jaruzelski and the party chose to bargain, hoping to share responsibility for hard economic choices while keeping control.²

The plan backfired. Voters struck out many of the unopposed Communist candidates, who needed more than half the vote even without rivals. A crisis followed, and in August 1989 Solidarity adviser Tadeusz Mazowiecki became prime minister of the first non-communist government in the Eastern bloc, with Jaruzelski staying on as president. Poland began rapid market reforms in January 1990. Within months, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania followed with their own transitions, which is why 1989 is called the Year of Revolutions.²