Santa Clara University Scholar Commons Political Science College of Arts & Sciences 6-5-2003 Poland's Ex--Communists: From Pariahs to Establishment Players Jane Leftwich Curry Santa Clara University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.scu.edu/poli_sci Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Curry, J. L. (2003). Poland’s Ex--Communists: From Pariahs to Establishment Players. In The Left rT ansformed in Post-Communist Societies: The asC es of East-Central Europe, Russia, and Ukraine (pp. 19–60). Rowman & Littlefield. Copyright © 2003. Reproduced by permission of Rowman & Littlefield. All rights reserved. Please contact the publisher for permission to copy, distribute or reprint. This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Arts & Sciences at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Political Science by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. CHAPTER ONE Poland's Ex--Communists: From Pariahs to Establishment Players Jane Leftwich Curry The Polish United Workers' Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza [PZPR]) suffered what seemed to be a terminal blow in 1989. In elections rigged so that the communists and their old allies were guaranteed 65 percent of the seats in the main house of parliament, the communists did so badly that their old allies deserted them. After what appeared to be a total defeat, all the communist reformers could do was turn the government over to the men and women of Solidarity they had interned and harassed for more than a decade.