and combinations, the allocation of Sejm seats is given in table 9 for the beginning and the close of the legislature’s five-year term. In the Senate, party alignments were firmer and, except for a major defection from the Piast Party, seat allocations did not change much.
8
The next four years witnessed the accelerating degeneration of Polish parliamentary life and of governmental stability. Piłsudski’s response to the constitutional engineering of the Right was to decline nomination to the presidency. The new Sejm and Senate, sitting jointly as the National Assembly, thereupon elected Gabriel Narutowicz on December 9, 1922, in an exceedingly bitter contest requiring five ballots. The winning balance of 289 versus 227 was supplied by a coalition of the Left, the Center, and the National Minorities. A week later, on December 16, 1922, the new president was assassinated by a rightist fanatic because he owed his margin of victory to non-Polish votes. The murder deepened the chasm between the Right and Piłsudski, who never forgave the National Democrats for what he regarded as their moral responsibility for the murder of Poland’s first president.
TABLE 9
PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS, NOVEMBER, 1922
On December 20, 1922, the same Left-Center-National Minorities coalition, by a vote of 298 to 221, elected to the presidency the founder of Poland’s cooperative system, Stanisław Wojciechowski. The victorious coalition broke up soon thereafter when Wincenty Witos took his Piast Peasant Party into partnership with the Right in the spring of 1923. In any event, Wojciechowski’s election was already something of a concession by the other parties to the Right, which considered him the least objectionable candidate outside its own ranks.
Wojciechowski’s office was weak in the manner of the French presidency under the Third Republic. Elected for a seven-year term, the president had neither legislative initiative nor a veto, and he could dissolve the Sejm only with the assent of three-fifths of the total number of 111 Senators in the presence of at least half the 444 Sejm deputies, the Senate thereby dissolving itself simultaneously. In fact, these provisions for dissolution by the president were a dead letter, and their ineffectiveness became an important factor that contributed to the crisis of 1926. Equally inoperative was the power of the Sejm to dissolve itself by a two-thirds vote.
In effect, executive power rested within the cabinet, which was dependent on a Sejm majority. The large number of parties and their tendency toward splits, excessive maneuvering for office, and frequent change of partnerships rendered such majorities highly unstable. Ministerial upheavals were consequently frequent. The cabinet that Piłsudski ousted by his coup of May, 1926, was Poland’s fourteenth since November, 1918—not counting reshuffling of portfolios within any one cabinet.
This instability tended to weaken the ministers in relation to both party leaders and individual deputies. The minister, frequently so transient as to be unable to familiarize himself adequately with the work of his department, was often bullied by his party’s leaders into transforming both its policy and its personnel into a party rampart. Individual deputies, acting as messengers for powerful interests and constituents, shamelessly applied pressure on both ministers and civil servants. The government, in turn, would try to secure a deputy’s support through judicious use of state credits, import and export licenses, land leases, forest concessions, and the administration of the alcohol and tobacco monopolies. Ironically, the deputies, who on the one hand habitually exceeded their authority by chronic interference with administration, would simultaneously shirk their basic legislative and budgetary responsibilities through excessive recourse to delegated legislation and to ex post facto legalization of economic and fiscal departures by the cabinet. A raucous and intensely partisan press aggravated the general political debasement and maximized the timidity of the ministers.
While corruption and venality were probably not as extensive as the public thought them to be, the very belief in their pervasiveness proved fatal to the prevailing political order. By 1926 the Sejm, though elected by universal suffrage, was out of touch with a public that craved stronger and more disciplined and responsible government. The beneficiary of this decline in the prestige of the legislature in particular, and of parliamentary politics in general, was Piłsudski, who in May and July of 1923 had followed up his earlier refusal of the presidency by resigning from his military functions and withdrawing into intensely political retirement.
Piłsudski had been provoked into resigning from all his public offices by the formation, on May 28, of a Right-Center coalition government in which the Piast leader Wincenty Witos was prime minister but the National Democrats held the most important portfolios and set the political tone. Its refusal to assuage the peasants’ hunger for radical land reform and its failure to stem a disastrous inflation provoked serious unrest and brought this cabinet down on December 14, 1923. It was replaced by a supraparty ministry led by the financial expert Władysław Grabski, who was close to the National Democrats.
A mixture of politicians and experts, the Grabski cabinet governed largely through delegated legislation, thus indicating the legislature’s declining authority and prestige. It drastically revised the currency and banking systems, replacing the hopelessly inflated mark with the gold-based złoty; it resolutely collected taxes and energetically promoted industrialization. But it was undermined by a decline in the world market price for three major Polish exports—coal, lumber, and sugar—and by Germany’s launching a politically motivated tariff war against Poland on June 15, 1925. Under these circumstances, Grabski’s program of combining industrial expansion with financial stabilization proved untenable, and another run on the złoty, together with public unrest, forced his resignation on November 14, 1925. His fall was widely interpreted as a failure not only of democracy but even of semidemocracy, for democracy was assumed to have already been abdicated with the legislature’s grant of wide decree powers to Grabski at the beginning of his tenure.
Another inflationary spiral now uncurled and unemployment increased starkly. Public disillusion was profound; the great sacrifices of the past two years appeared to have been in vain. But though he was the beneficiary of this atmosphere of crisis and frustration, Piłsudski’s time had not yet come; the political parties decided on one more try at a broad parliamentary coalition. On November 20, 1925, a cabinet headed by the foreign minister of the outgoing Grabski cabinet, Count Aleksander Skrzyński, took office.
Inauspicious was the manner in which the Skrzyński cabinet was formed. The parliamentary leaders of the five member parties—National Democratic, Christian Democratic, Piast Peasant, National Labor, and Socialist (the Wyzwolenie Peasant Party was the one major Polish group to decline participation or support)—distributed the portfolios and then invited Skrzyński as a nonparty man to head this cabinet. The prime minister, who also retained the foreign affairs portfolio, was thus virtually an outsider in his own government. He owed his position to the fact that the party leaders did not trust each other sufficiently to agree on an oustanding political figure as prime minister, and to the expectation that his good reputation in the West (he had accommodated Poland’s foreign policy to the Locarno system) would facilitate Poland’s quest for loans and credits there. Known as the government of “national concord,” this five-party coalition was a particularly inept one, composed as it was of parties with diametrically contradictory fiscal and economic theories in a situation of immediate and intense fiscal-economic crisis. The National Democrats had insisted on holding the ministries of Finance and Education, which were crucial for economic and ethnic-minority policy, as their price for entering the cabinet. The Socialists on the other hand were determined to force pump-priming and welfare spending on the government through their Ministry of Public Works and that of Labor and Welfare. Though the assignment of the War Ministry to one of his protégés had briefly purchased Piłsudski’s toleration, this cabinet was wracked by too many internal contradictions to take a strong position on any controversial issue or to avoid eventual schism.
In
