Piłsudski had been provoked into resigning from all his public offices by the formation, on May 28, of a Right-Center coalition government in which the Piast leader Wincenty Witos was prime minister but the National Democrats held the most important portfolios and set the political tone. Its refusal to assuage the peasants’ hunger for radical land reform and its failure to stem a disastrous inflation provoked serious unrest and brought this cabinet down on December 14, 1923. It was replaced by a supraparty ministry led by the financial expert Władysław Grabski, who was close to the National Democrats.
A mixture of politicians and experts, the Grabski cabinet governed largely through delegated legislation, thus indicating the legislature’s declining authority and prestige. It drastically revised the currency and banking systems, replacing the hopelessly inflated mark with the gold-based złoty; it resolutely collected taxes and energetically promoted industrialization. But it was undermined by a decline in the world market price for three major Polish exports—coal, lumber, and sugar—and by Germany’s launching a politically motivated tariff war against Poland on June 15, 1925. Under these circumstances, Grabski’s program of combining industrial expansion with financial stabilization proved untenable, and another run on the złoty, together with public unrest, forced his resignation on November 14, 1925. His fall was widely interpreted as a failure not only of democracy but even of semidemocracy, for democracy was assumed to have already been abdicated with the legislature’s grant of wide decree powers to Grabski at the beginning of his tenure.
Another inflationary spiral now uncurled and unemployment increased starkly. Public disillusion was profound; the great sacrifices of the past two years appeared to have been in vain. But though he was the beneficiary of this atmosphere of crisis and frustration, Piłsudski’s time had not yet come; the political parties decided on one more try at a broad parliamentary coalition. On November 20, 1925, a cabinet headed by the foreign minister of the outgoing Grabski cabinet, Count Aleksander Skrzyński, took office.
Inauspicious was the manner in which the Skrzyński cabinet was formed. The parliamentary leaders of the five member parties—National Democratic, Christian Democratic, Piast Peasant, National Labor, and Socialist (the Wyzwolenie Peasant Party was the one major Polish group to decline participation or support)—distributed the portfolios and then invited Skrzyński as a nonparty man to head this cabinet. The prime minister, who also retained the foreign affairs portfolio, was thus virtually an outsider in his own government. He owed his position to the fact that the party leaders did not trust each other sufficiently to agree on an oustanding political figure as prime minister, and to the expectation that his good reputation in the West (he had accommodated Poland’s foreign policy to the Locarno system) would facilitate Poland’s quest for loans and credits there. Known as the government of “national concord,” this five-party coalition was a particularly inept one, composed as it was of parties with diametrically contradictory fiscal and economic theories in a situation of immediate and intense fiscal-economic crisis. The National Democrats had insisted on holding the ministries of Finance and Education, which were crucial for economic and ethnic-minority policy, as their price for entering the cabinet. The Socialists on the other hand were determined to force pump-priming and welfare spending on the government through their Ministry of Public Works and that of Labor and Welfare. Though the assignment of the War Ministry to one of his protégés had briefly purchased Piłsudski’s toleration, this cabinet was wracked by too many internal contradictions to take a strong position on any controversial issue or to avoid eventual schism.
In March and April, 1926, the złoty currency broke. Many banks failed as deposits were withdrawn in panic. A third of the industrial labor force stood unemployed, and this did not include youths entering the labor market for the first time or the several million “superfluous” village poor. Demonstrations of unemployed and riots, with attendant loss of lives, took place in many towns. Calls for a dictatorship became ever more general and open, and even those who opposed this drastic remedy were demanding early constitutional revision so as to strengthen the president and give him effective power to dissolve the legislature.
The National Democratic finance minister insisted on a thoroughly deflationary policy toward the crisis. He severed the automatic correlation of wages to prices (the abolition of the cost-of-living bonus), dismissed 18,000-25,000 railroad workers, and sharply reduced (by about 35 percent) compensation payments to the sick, the disabled, and the aged. He also raised all taxes, except for those on real property, by 10 percent and instituted a head tax of five złoty per person. The price of gas, electricity, oil, salt, tobacco, matches, and alcohol was raised so as to render these state enterprises and monopolies economically viable.
The Socialists also wished to balance the budget but not at the shameless expense of workers, employees, and civil servants. They were caught in a double embarrassment. Initially they suggested cutting down expenditures by reducing police and army outlays but dropped the latter proposal at the request of their former comrade Piłsudski, whom many among them still considered one of their own. Initially, also, they had agreed to a three months’ reduction in the cost-of-living bonus of state employees, but, embarrassed by the Communist pressure on their left and by the outraged response of those affected, they refused toward the end of March to extend this concession. Then they also demanded immediate massive investments in construction and industry so as to break the unemployment curve, as well as a heavy capital levy and a substantial increase in the real property tax. When the National Democrats refused to consider such a policy, the marshal (speaker) of the Sejm summoned an extraordinary conference of political leaders on April 18, 1926, which proved abortive. The discussion was more formal than genuine since each side had for days been warning that it would not retreat. Failing to force the substitution of their own fiscal-economic program for the Right’s, the Socialists withdrew their ministers from the government on April 20.
The next day Skrzyński offered President Wojciechowski the resignation of his entire cabinet, but he was persuaded to delay this step until the budget estimates for May and June had been accepted by the Sejm and Senate in order to avoid a governmental vacuum at the critical time of the workers’ May Day demonstrations. The Right and Center leaders, who had been negotiating with each other for a renewal of their coalition of 1923, urged Skrzyński to replace the departing Socialists with members of their own parties and to carry on the government on such a reconstructed basis. At that time, however, Skrzyński was convinced that Poland could not be governed against both Piłsudski and the Socialists. He therefore provisionally reassigned the Socialists’ erstwhile portfolios on a nonparty and “acting” basis, and, with May Day as well as the national holiday of May 3 peacefully behind him and the May-June budget estimates passed, he then resigned on May 5, 1926, opening the parliamentary era’s last and most severe cabinet crisis.
The Right and Center leaders chose to disregard the skepticism of Skrzyński and other reflective men concerning the feasibility of governing Poland against both Piłsudski and the Left, and to disregard also the fact that the legislature in which they commanded an arithmetic majority no longer mirrored the political mood of a public exasperated by chronic crises. Their formation of another Witos-led coalition cabinet on May 10, and their simultaneous intimations of a radical purge of their enemies out of the state apparatus, provoked Piłsudski’s and the Left’s violent riposte of May 12-14, 1926. By then Piłsudski believed that he had given the party system more than enough time to correct itself and that he could no longer be accused of a premature or unnecessary or merely self-serving grab for power.
9
In addition to this unhappy record of parliamentary degeneration, two other sets of problems—army organization and foreign policy—helped pave the path to Piłsudski’s coup d’état. He and his fellow ex-Legionnaires were constantly at odds with military veterans from the former Austro-Hungarian armies and with rightist politicians over the proper organization of the armed forces’ high command and its appropriate relations with the government. Here Piłsudski’s enemies insisted on the primacy of the war minister, who was answerable to the Sejm and thus represented the principle of civilian, constitutional