Leszek Miller, Poland’s wily man of the future

HE MUST be one of Central Europe's canniest survivors from the communist era, for Leszek Miller is the only Pole still in the forefront of politics who was a member of his country's last Politburo to take its cue from the Kremlin. Under the communists, whose memory most Poles still revile, he was an eager apparatchik. Yet now, in his shiny new social democratic guise, he looks set to become the country's prime minister after the general election due this autumn, as the ruling right, under its once-glorious Solidarity banner, collapses amid recrimination and muddle. Is Mr Miller up to the task?

If he gets it, he is likely to be in the top job at a historic moment—just when Poland joins the European Union. Indeed, Mr Miller will probably be in charge of the negotiations as they reach their most delicate stage, in the first half of next year. It will be tricky. Two bad bits of news hit Poland last week. First, the OECD suggested that nearly 17% of Poles would soon be out of a job. Second, the European Commission in Brussels decided to back a German proposal that, even when Poland and other Central European countries have joined the Union, they must still wait for up to seven years before their people can travel freely around the EU looking for jobs.

The economic shake-up and job losses following communism's fall are now linked in many Polish minds to efforts to prepare the country for the EU. But jobless Poles are being denied the safety-valve of automatic access to labour markets in the west. If the EU keeps its doors shut, the poorest Poles, who have suffered most under the past decade's rough switch to the market and who are Mr Miller's natural supporters, could become very angry. Some are already. When Romano Prodi, the commission's head, visited Poland earlier this year, a few ungrateful Poles pelted him with eggs.

Yet, with the election looming, both sides are finding it ever harder to make concessions, for fear of looking weak and unpatriotic in the voters' eyes. Mr Miller, for example, says that any transitional period before Poles can go freely to the west for jobs is “unacceptable”. But privately he must know that concessions on a host of issues, from the free movement of labour to Polish access to farm subsidies, are inevitable if a deal is to be struck. In a hint that he recognises as much, he adds: “We know that Poland is negotiating to join the EU, not the other way round.”

Certainly the bureaucrats in Brussels trying to clinch a deal are hoping that Mr Miller will be flexible when, early next year, the critical issues of farming and regional aid will be tackled. But this is where the sneers of his compatriots on the right may make him hesitate. His past, they say, predisposes him to truckle to foreigners. “Moscow, Brussels—it's all the same to him,” says one.

Mr Miller is indeed notably unrepentant about his communist past—unlike, by contrast, President Alexander Kwasniewski, another ex-communist who was once minister of sport in the old era. Mr Miller, now 54, still justifies the ruthless, Soviet-approved imposition of martial law and the crushing of dissidence under General Wojciech Jaruzelski in 1981, when he was an obedient party hack. “He saved us from something much worse,” says Mr Miller, meaning the bloodier Soviet repression meted out in similar circumstances to Czechs and Hungarians. And, though he talks the lingo of social democracy, he still presses the buttons of class struggle. “In Poland there are people feeding off rubbish dumps,” he says, bemoaning the widening gap between rich and poor.

In fact, Mr Miller has cleverly created a political persona that bows loyally to the proletarian past and the old welfare state while at the same time praising the market and modernisation. The nationalist right, at the heart of the current government, insists—naturally enough—that under his fresh veneer Mr Miller is still a dogged socialist who will readily betray his country's new-found sovereignty. Some say he still has a hot line to the Kremlin and still quietly cherishes old links with the Russian intelligence service; some even hint—without hard evidence—that he got Russian money to help found his party, the Democratic Left Alliance. He was, they darkly point out, interior minister in the ex-communist government of 1993-97.

Moreover, he readily acknowledges that his government would be less friendly to the Roman Catholic church, long the repository of Polish nationalism and a buttress of the right. Mr Miller says he will ease laws against abortion and against sex education in schools, and will legislate to make women more equal to men. He says he will tilt welfare to give bigger handouts to the poorest. Unlike many on the right, he does not romanticise the countryside; he was brought up in a small milling town.

But his style has changed drastically, even in the past few years. He is learning English—he spent a month last summer with a family in Canterbury—sports natty golf sweaters bought by his wife, skis in Austria and tells of his emotion when granted an audience with the pope. He expresses admiration for some of the old dissidents he used to fight against, such as Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron. He says his favourite book is “The Master and Margarita”, the uproarious lampoon of early Soviet Russia by Mikhail Bulgakov. All too neat a conversion? “A dancing monkey auditioning for a part,” is how a sceptical ambassador in Warsaw describes a meeting with him.

But few deny that Mr Miller is a consummate politician, and a good example of how much Poland's ex-communists have changed. His solution to unemployment? Let the economy grow faster. Taxes on business and investment must be cut. It should be easier to hire and fire. Joining the EU will, he says, be the third greatest moment in Poland's history, after its conversion to Christianity a millennium ago, and the union of Poland and Lithuania in 1569, when Poles agreed to be ruled by a Lithuanian king in a joint domain that later once stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. “We have no alternative” to joining the EU, he says. “We can't be on the outside of a European civilisation that is prosperous and democratic; we must modernise ourselves—and we can't do it alone.”