ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
consisting of elected representatives and delegates from the municipalities, state
departments and professional corporations. In 1935, plans for the institutionalization of a
corporatist single-party dictatorship were presented in the electoral campaign and
announced to Goering; however, Gömbös died the following year, and with him his plans,
which had in any event been blocked for some time when the corporatist system was taken
off the agenda and the reorganization of the party suspended. Some of the party’s
organizations were dismantled and it was restored to its ‘original condition of an electoral
machine based on the local bureaucracy’.
Somehow anticipating the academic discussions on hybrid or semi-democratic regimes that
were to take place at the beginning of the 21st century, in 1972 one historian of Poland
defined the inter-war Polish regime as a ‘semi-constitutional guided democracy’. In fact,
when Józef Pilsudski led the coup d’état that overthrew Poland’s parliamentary democracy in
1926, it did not lead to a rapid transition to dictatorship. With his origins in democratic
nationalism, which was very different from the counter-revolutionary origins of the
Hungarian leading elite at the same time, some of the dilemmas in classifying Pilsudski’s
regime do not differ greatly from those of Bethlem’s Hungary. The concentration of power,
the creation of a dominant party coalition, the Non-partisan Bloc for Co-operation with the
Government (BBWR – Bezpartyjny Blok Wspólpracy z Rzadem), to support the general in
parliament and, finally, the presentation of a new constitution and of a more coherent
dominant party were the marks of his governance While Pilsudski had many powers,
parliament – despite having been diminished and controlled – continued to be a problem for
the president, given that it still represented a very significant degree of pluralism.
In 1935, a new constitution attempted to limit much that was already the functional praxis of
the regime. The executive was made responsible to the president rather than parliament,
with article two stating the president was responsible only ‘to God and history’ for the
fortune of the state, a principal later replicated by dictators like Franco in Spain. The
constitution provided for a bicameral system; however, the amount of legislation that could
be decided by decree was increased. The decisive break with liberal parliamentarianism was
nevertheless adopted by the electoral laws defining the legislature’s composition. The
innovation was in the definition of the electorate, which remained individual and direct,
although candidates were to be nominated organically.
The parliament (Sejm) was reduced from 444 to 208 deputies, with the country divided into
104 two-member constituencies in which the candidates were selected by local commissions
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