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The general's bid for domestic peace has been spurred by a harsh political reality: without creating some consensus of support, he cannot begin reconstructing Poland's shattered economy. Real wages last year amounted to less than 80% of 1980 levels, while net investment in industry and agriculture in the same period fell by 50% and exports that bring in badly needed hard currency dropped almost 25%. The biggest drain continues to be Poland's huge foreign debt, which now stands at more than $31 billion. Last September Polish and Western negotiators signed an agreement rescheduling 95% of the payments owed to lenders through 1987. Still, Finance Minister Bazyli Samojlik conceded last week that Poland would not be able to meet the $550 million due before the end of this year.
With the evident approval of Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Jaruzelski hopes to turn Poland's economy around by adopting the kind of quasi-capitalist reforms that have been introduced in Hungary since 1968. Among them: giving greater responsibility to factory managers, encouraging private enterprise to boost exports and consumer goods and services, creating wage incentives to improve productivity and reforming the tax system to stimulate investment. But the regime faces an uphill struggle. At every level, bureaucrats committed to centralized planning have for too long kept the country locked into a rigid economic system devoted to heavy industrial production at a time when consumers often lack such everyday essentials as forks and frying pans and still stand in line for rationed meat and gasoline.
Polish officials complain that their economic woes have been made worse by Western trade restrictions imposed after martial law was declared. Last October Solidarity Founder Lech Walesa and nine other prominent Polish opposition figures and moderate intellectuals issued an appeal to the U.S., urging President Reagan to "play a significant role" in putting the Polish economy back on track by lifting the remaining U.S. sanctions. Washington may be receptive to the plea. "Things are warming up step by step," says an Administration official. "But we have always urged caution. The Poles have often announced sweeping changes and then have failed to deliver."
Indeed, doubts persist about how genuine Jaruzelski's conciliatory gestures really are. Shortly after the September amnesty, Solidarity leaders gathered in Gdansk, the birthplace of the movement,to announce the formation of a Temporary Council of Solidarity. The organization's stated aim: to propose ways of cooperating with the regime in improving the economy and advancing political freedoms. Government Spokesman Jerzy Urban denounced the organization as "yet another illegal body." In the new era of openness, Warsaw clearly does not intend to share power with anyone, particularly if his name is Walesa.