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As he left Warsaw and later departed for Rome for talks with Pope John Paul II, the Archbishop said that he thought that the situation "was clearing up. I'm a little more optimistic. What we need is social order. We need authority and we need work. It was for that reason that we had our meeting."
Order certainly was not what Walesa faced when he returned to the unruly Solidarity meeting, which had continued in rump session while he was taking part in the discussions in Warsaw. There was still a touch of the mutinous mood when Walesa took the podium to make a report. Said he: "The authorities have stated that they are prepared to undertake talks on all problems important for the Poles." But he warned that Jaruzelski expected both sides to make compromises.
To demonstrate Solidarity's good faith, Walesa repeated his call for an end to Poland's current welter of strikes. Earlier in the week, he had persuaded the 120,000-member chapter in Tarnobrzeg Province to end a ten-day walkout, but approximately 160,000 workers remained idle throughout the country.
In the end, Solidarity's radical factions won the day. The commission declared that Walesa's negotiations had been a "positive step," but it refused to help in reining in the strikers. Then the commission set a three-month deadline for success in the forthcoming negotiations with Jaruzelski and threatened to call a general strike if there were no satisfactory results by that time. Walesa's main victory was to obtain an endorsement of a statement that Solidarity would be ready to "make concessions and seek compromises justified by the supreme good of Polish society."
Walesa and Jaruzelski increasingly face the problem of being hamstrung by their hard-line factions. The severity of the challenge to their respective authorities may sharpen when government-union talks begin, possibly as early as the end of this week, over such Solidarity demands as democratic local elections, worker self-management, and a socio-economic council to monitor the country's industrial performance. The moderate instincts of Walesa and Jaruzelski, as well as those of Poland's Roman Catholic Church, will once again be tested.
—By George Russell.
Reported by Roland Flamini/Bonn