page_title: Jan Olszewski
section_title: Parliamentary career: 1992-2005
hierarchical_section_title: Jan Olszewski / Post-Premiership / Parliamentary career: 1992-2005
caption_attribution_description: Polski: Wizyta Jana Pawła II w Parlamencie RP. 11 czerwca 1999. Papież wita się z byłym premierem RP Janem Olszewskim. English: Visit of John Paul II to the Parliament of the Republic of Poland. June 11, 1999. The Pope greets the former Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland, Jan Olszewski.
context_page_description: Jan Ferdynand Olszewski was a Polish conservative lawyer and politician who served as the Prime Minister of Poland for five months between December 1991 and early June 1992 and later became a leading figure of the national conservative Movement for the Reconstruction of Poland.
  During his premiership, Olszewski's cabinet worked under new international conditions. At the end of December 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved. This motivated the government to start integration with NATO and European Community. For the first time, in official documents, it was mentioned that membership in NATO is part of Polish defence strategies. Negotiations to withdraw Russian armies from Poland started at the end of October 1990, we speeded up. In March 1992, a period of confusion occurred when president Lech Wałęsa presented his conception of new economic and military alliance with former Warsaw Pact during his visit to Germany, which went against the euro Atlantic direction of the government. Olszewski’s government changed the concept of privatization of national corporations. Total stop of privatization led to open conflict with liberal groups in the parliament.
context_section_description: Following his dismissal, Olszewski resumed his career as a member of the Sejm. Olszewski departed from the Centre Agreement in the summer of 1992 with a number of other rebel MPs, creating the Movement for the Republic. The new party was joined by other anti-Wałęsa and former Solidarity supporters, carrying a quasi-nationalist and ultra-Catholic platform. As a parliamentarian, Olszewski led his club's opposition to the Small Constitution, believing it did not offer a clear break from the Stalinist constitution of 1956. Olszewski led his party to support the vote of no confidence against Prime Minister Hanna Suchocka in 1993, believing her economic policies had harmed the state. In the subsequent elections that year, Olszewski lost his seat as the electorate swung to the Democratic Left Alliance (led by Aleksander Kwaśniewski), despite a failed attempt to reunite rightist forces with the Centre Agreement, now headed by Jarosław Kaczyński.
  In 1995, Olszewski launched a bid for the presidency in that year's presidential election in order to replace his rival Wałęsa. Campaigning on an anti-communist and patriotic platform, Olszewski garnered 1,225,453 votes, with nearly seven percent of the vote and earned fourth place. However, both he and Wałęsa lost to winning left-wing candidate Aleksander Kwaśniewski from Social Democracy. Later in the same year, in an attempt to consolidate the former premier's relatively strong performance in the presidential ballot, Olszewski and his supporters established the Movement for the Reconstruction of Poland. 
  Under the new party banner, poll numbers initially gave Olszewski's block a sixteen percent approval rating by the middle of 1996, yet this period was cut short with the creation of Solidarity Electoral Action, a rival conservative alliance led by Marian Krzaklewski.  The results of the 1997 parliamentary election garnered Olszewski's party with 5.6 percent of the vote, returning the former premier to the Sejm with 6 seats. During this period, Olszewski supported Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek's 1997 concordant with the Holy See, reasoning that the Catholic Church was "one of the most important, if not the most important, and certainly the most durable, longest-running and most rooted institution in Polish national life and culture". At the same time, Olszewski also generally supported European integration and the government's efforts for Poland's accession into the European Union, though stressed reservations on the economic conditions of integration, particularly insisting that the national banking sector must remain within domestic hands. However, the Movement became increasingly marginalized due to numerous party splits.
  During the 2000 presidential election, Olszewski stood again as a candidate, but withdrew from the race shortly before the vote and later supported the Solidarity Electoral Action candidate Marian Krzaklewski. Olszewski was reelected to the Sejm in 2001, with his party allied with the populist far-right League of Polish Families.  However, Olszewski broke with the League shortly after his reelection over policy differences. Prior to Poland's admission into the EU in 2004, Olszewski expressed worry that Poland's accession to the European Union would pave the way for Germans to make property claims regarding land seized during the population expulsions at the end of World War II. The former premier also expressed in 2005 his support for strong security and political relations with the United States within a transatlantic framework, though expressed reservations to stronger ties with Germany until property claims were dealt with. 
  In 2005, Olszewski, along with his former cabinet ministers Antoni Macierewicz and Gabriel Janowski, created the Patriotic Movement, a right-wing nationalist political block combining the forces of his own party with those of the National-Catholic Movement and the Polish Alliance, where he became the head of the new organization. In that year's parliamentary election, Olszewski ran for a Senate seat in the Warsaw constituency for the Law and Ju
caption: Olszewski greeting Pope John Paul II to the Sejm and Senate Complex, 1999
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