1989 Polish talks helped end communism across CEE: president

The Polish head of state was speaking to an audience of historians, sociologists and political scientists from several countries at an international conference at the presidential palace in Warsaw on Thursday.

Duda told the two-day conference—entitled On the Downfall of Communism: 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe—that the 1989 Polish talks led to a “bloodless revolution” in the country and initiated "the autumn of nations" across Central Europe, including "triangular table" talks in Hungary, the "Velvet Revolution" in Czechoslovakia, and eventually the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Friday marks exactly 30 years since Poland's democratic opposition and the country's former communist leaders concluded the talks, which paved the way to the collapse of communism in the country and across the region.

Poland’s Round Table talks between the ruling communists and the Solidarity opposition movement took place in Warsaw from February 6 to April 5, 1989. They set the stage for a transition to democracy and the breakup of the communist bloc.

The talks opened the way to partially free elections to the lower house of Poland’s parliament, the Sejm, and completely free elections to the upper house, the Senate, in June that year.

As a result of the talks, Poland’s communist government agreed to legalise the Solidarity trade union movement and to move toward political pluralism, freedom of speech and independence of courts.

Deal 'on the communists' terms'

Duda said in a media interview published in February that the overall balance of the landmark 1989 Round Table talks between the opposition and Poland’s onetime communist rulers is “positive” in hindsight though critics have their doubts.

Critics argue the 1989 talks should not have gone ahead at the time and that a smarter move would have been to “wait until the communists grew weaker” and only then carry out political and economic changes in the country “because de facto what happened was done on the communists' terms,” Duda said in the interview.

He added that as a result of that deal Polish public life was still marred by communist holdovers, “by what we call post-communism—in the sense of many dysfunctional practices that we are fighting” to this day.

(gs/pk)

Source: IAR