When a revolution’s over, it’s over. Poland is a perfect example of this maxim. There the same people who led the revolution that brought down Communism in 1989 could not hold on to power in the reborn, democratic Poland.

In late September, Solidarity—born out of the labor movement that led the 1980s Polish revolt against Communism—officially died. Twelve years after the fall of Communism, Poland’s Solidarity movement was crushed on Sunday, September 23, in the nation’s fourth free election since 1989; Solidarity failed to win a single seat in parliament.

Solidarity’s loss to liberal ex-Communist Social Democrats in the latest election was no surprise, however; it only put the last nail in the movement’s political coffin. Solidarity’s failure as a ruling party had been established long ago.

Lech Walesa was, as history has already recorded, the Gdansk shipyard worker who founded and led the Solidarity labor union that was instrumental in overthrowing the Communists in Poland. But images of Walesa being carried triumphantly on the shoulders of Polish workers through the streets quickly gave way to election losses. After he served as president for five years, the Solidarity era really ended when Walesa lost a reelection battle in a runoff to Aleksander Kwasniewski in 1995. Walesa—rugged, middle-class, and “not quite ready for prime time”—proved no match for the media-savvy Kwasniewski. (Walesa refused to shake his opponent’s hand, because of his Communist roots, calling him a thug.) Later, when Walesa himself broke with the party in 1999 to run for president on his own, he received less than 1 percent of the vote.

Kwasniewski, a Social Democrat, managed to put together a coalition when Solidarity regained control of parliament in 1997. But infighting soon undermined that coalition. Instead of uniting and reforming, Solidarity’s political operatives, in the words of papal biographer George Weigel, “went out of their way to kill themselves with a death of a thousand cuts.”

Still, Poles do have their share of collective problems. After dramatic post-Communist economic growth, today Poles are feeling the harsh realities of the transition to a market-based economy, while still holding onto vestiges of their old controlled economy. Consumer confidence is at its lowest point since the post-Communist recovery began. The economy is only growing at a rate of 2 percent, compared to 7 percent in 1997 and 4-5 percent rate in the three years after that. Unemployment is at 16 percent. And foreign investors, who piled into Poland with $13 billion last year, have not spent half that much this year.

So by the end of election day, the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), the Social Democrats of Poland, had won. Leszek Miller, who was a member of the last Communist Politburo, was elected prime minister of Poland’s first non-coalition government since free elections were instituted over eleven years ago. The party’s slogan, “Let’s bring back normality,” resonated with voters who were unhappy with what they found in their wallets and who are still recovering from the impact of a summer marked by devastating floods.

Five smaller parties—the centrist Civic Platform, which came in second in last year’s presidential election and views itself as the descendent of Solidarity; the right-wing Law and Justice Party; the Self Defense Party; the Peasants Party; and the newly established League of Families, which claims to represent the views of the Church—also won seats in parliament. Solidarity needed just 8 percent of the vote to stay in parliament; the party managed to win only 4.5 percent.

The newly elected prime minister quickly pointed out that his party was the first to win its own working majority in the Polish legislature. “It’s the first time since 1989 that any political group got so many votes and a majority of seat in parliament,” Miller said upon winning. “This means a great responsibility for us.”

James Robbins, a professor at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, explained the decline of Solidarity’s fortunes:

Their electoral collapse makes sense —they were being blamed for the poor economy. It was the “what have you done for use lately?” phenomenon. Sure, Solidarity helped bring down Communism but that was a long time ago. Politics is fickle. Remember, Churchill was voted out only weeks after Germany surrendered in 1945.

The parliamentary victory in September handed control of all levers of government power to the Social Democrats, whose founder Alexander Kwasniewski was reelected to the presidency last year.

Even after bringing down Communism, Solidarity had enjoyed some important successes: the first Solidarity government saw through a number of significant reforms, including unprecedented economic growth, and Poland’s entry into NATO. But it did not take long for Solidarity to implode, with political initiative giving way to bickering and scandal.

The party didn’t help itself by employing heavy-handed tactics like its 1999 law to ban former Communist officials from public posts for ten years. The law would have not only banned ex-Communists from elective office, but would have forced the resignation of hundreds of bureaucratic officials. The unpopular bill was sponsored by 100 Solidarity members in parliament; one member presented it as “the last chance to cut the umbilical cord still linking democratic Poland with the totalitarian, collaborating state that was Communist Poland.”

At the time of the vote on the law, Adam Michnik, a former Solidarity leader said:

The debate revealed a skeleton in Solidarity’s cupboard, a skeleton of a deeply undemocratic conviction that freedom is only for the supporters of the Solidarity-rooted parties. We should consider why so many people vote for the ex-Communists.

And Lech Walesa, no fan of Solidarity in its final days, said, “They should act like Solidarity did in its early days: Conquer lawlessness with law, conquer lack of democracy with democratic actions—not bans, but the ballot card.”

Walesa also claims, “I said long ago, let’s roll up our banners and go to work in a different form. But nobody listened to me. So we will roll up the banners now, defeated.”

Even Lech Walesa admits that there is a sharp distinction between success in human-rights advocacy and success in leading a country. After voting in this fall’s general election near his home in Gdansk, Walesa told waiting reporters, “Trade unions are good for defending rights of workers, not for governing.”

In some ways, actually, the departure of Solidarity from Poland’s parliamentary scene marks an important step forward for the country’s political system. James Robbins of the National Defense University explains:

A democratic transition is not complete until the first post-revolutionary transfer of power: that is, when the party that made the change from autocracy to democracy loses power and goes into opposition. It shows that they really do accept democracy, as winners or losers. After all it’s easy to accept a system if you are in power, but not so easy to voluntarily give power up. So this marks the true emergence of Polish democracy, with a proven, competitive party system.

Meeting after the electoral loss this September, those Solidarity leaders who had not resigned in the wake of their defeat talked about making another effort at political life—perhaps regrouping next year under a new banner, one that would likely not include the word “Solidarity.” Outgoing prime minister Jerry Buzek told reporters, “Now we have to start from the very bottom, elect new party delegates, so they can come here and decide about a new image for our party.” A new party congress, possibly meeting in February, will decide Solidarity’s future.

Jacek Rybicki, who resigned as head of Solidarity’s political council after the final election defeat, told fellow Solidarity members before leaving, “We failed to communicate with the people, and we failed to convince the people about our actions.”

The Church played a crucial role in the fall of Communism; but then that is not surprising, since Catholicism has always played a significant role in Polish life. (Even the secular international media recognized as much when covering the Holy Father’s most recent visit to Poland, in 1999, which many believed would be his last. In the New York Times, a reporter covering the visit wrote, in a tone of admiration uncharacteristic for the Times, “The Catholic Church has provided the one thread of continuity in a nation constantly fighting extinction.”)

And it was because of the Church that Poland never totally succumbed to Communism. Radek Sikorski—a Polish dissident born in 1963 who fled to Britain at 19 and returned in 1990, becoming Lech Walesa’s defense minister—wrote in his 1997 memoir The Polish House: “Poland was never fully totalitarian because the Party never eradicated all organized sources of competing authority, most importantly the Catholic Church.”

For decades under Communism, the Church had sponsored programs that reconstructed a more complete understanding of Poland than those living under tyranny could otherwise attain. Long before the emergence of Solidarity, in the late 1960s, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla would do bold things like playing host to, of all things, a public lecture on George Orwell’s 1984.

And yet, like Solidarity, in present-day Poland the Church does not seem to receive the credit she deserves. The reason is partly because the leadership of the Church suffers from the same syndrome that afflicted Solidarity so fatally: It has not fully mastered the art of politics in a democracy. Writing in Foreign Affairs after Walesa’s failure to win reelection in 1995, Radek Sikorski observed that the Catholic Church:

. . . had been a bulwark against totalitarianism, but with the advent of democracy its authoritative tone began to grate. What alienated many Poles was not necessarily the Church’s attempts to wield political influence (its power as a lobbyist was inevitable in a predominantly Catholic country), but its clumsiness in doing so.

For instance, Church leaders wanted religious education to be reintroduced into the school system—but by executive degree rather then by popular legislation. And then there was the abortion law. In a report on post-Communist Poland, published in his journal First Things, Father Richard John Neuhaus noted that the problem with the abortion debate in Poland is that neither side challenged “the assumption that it is a matter of legislating ‘the Catholic position.’” Catholic leaders could have avoided the perception that this is a sectarian issue, he suggested, by framing their arguments in terms of human rights rather than of Church authority. Moreover, he observes, that form of argument would likely have been more persuasive to most Polish people, since it was in pursuit of human rights that the Church led the battle against Communism.

In fairness, Father Neuhaus continues, the fact that the question of abortion can be discussed in such terms “is not well understood here in the United States, so it is hardly surprising that it has not taken firm root in Poland after just a few years of freedom to engage in public debate. Hardly surprising, but still disturbing. “Predictably enough, nearly all recent international press coverage on the political influence of the Catholic Church in Poland has focused on the abortion issue. The country’s anti-abortion law is unpopular, according to opinion polls, and might soon follow the Solidarity government into political oblivion.

Maarek Pol, a member of the newly elected parliament, has announced that easing the tight restrictions imposed by the existing abortion law will be a top priority of the new government—second in importance only to the rescue of the Polish economy. “We believe abortions should be allowed when the woman faces hardship,” he said. (The current law, implemented in 1997, allows abortion in the cases of rape and danger to the life of the mother; doctors who perform illegal abortions can face prison terms of up to two years.) As a practical matter, however, proponents of a more liberal law may be speaking too soon; according to political analysts, the Social Democrats are about ten seats short of the parliamentary majority they would need, and they could lose a vote on the abortion issue after all.

The Church is doing a very good job in the social area (flood relief, unemployed, orphans, poor mothers, hospitals, education, youth clubs) and is in the right place where the government is pulling out or has to cut back because of the recent budget crises. The transfer from socialism to market capitalism is marked by the collapse of social services and the Church fills the void as much as it can.

“In a way,” adds Andrzej Brzeski, a professor of Eastern European politics at the University of California at Davis, “the Church resumed normal functions” after Communism.

Whatever the international media says, one can look to Poland’s main newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza—the Washington Post of Poland—to see the influence of the Church. Gazeta Wyborcza regularly carries op-ed columns by Catholic intellectuals, who make explicitly Catholic arguments. “Whether [the end of Solidarity and the election of a left-wing government] will accelerate the iron law of secularization isn’t apparent. I don’t think that is immediately in the cards in Poland,” notes George Weigel. “It is just too vibrantly and intensely and publicly Catholic a country.”

There is no danger that the Catholic Church will disappear from the public scene, as Solidarity apparently has. But Church leaders ought to learn some lessons from the movement they inspired and supported.

Michael Szporer, editor of the US-based Polish News, suggests the Church may still have an important mission in Polish politics—”to help Poles become more mature as a nation.” The collapse of Solidarity, a movement in which unity gave way to factionalism, was brought about, he believes, by “me-first features” that were “old residues of years, indeed centuries, of oppression, when ‘me’ didn’t count.” What Poland needs today, he continues, is a “new solidarity, one based on ideals of community and civil society, but practical and adjusted to our time.” The building of such a new national outlook is a task which only the Catholic Church has the moral authority to undertake.

There is a certain rhythm in post-1989 Polish politics. People who represent the former anti-Communist opposition introduce important reforms. Then the post-Communist camp uses its propaganda to show that all these reforms are of no use and of no value. This brings them to power. And they are only too happy to profit from the results of the reforms—they never touch the substance of any of them.

This political cycle is testimony to the very stability of democratic Poland, says George Weigel. He argues: “Poland’s democracy is secure.”

The election of a new parliamentary majority will not cause any fundamental shift in Poland’s policies, says Ryszard Legutko, a professor of philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He continues:

The fact that we have a new government should not have any effect on our relations in NATO—or of course, on Polish support for the US and its coalition’s war on terrorism. And the list goes on. . . . In a word, the differences, if any, will be rather those of nuances.

Poland had a “final revolution,” Weigel says, in 1989. The details are still being worked out, but the essential conversion from totalitarianism to democracy has occurred. Even Lech Walesa has said, “Our victory was so complete that even our enemies now follow our policies.”