Moraczewski government

On 17 November 1918 Ignacy Daszyński gave up the mission of forming a government that Józef Piłsudski had entrusted to him three days earlier. That same day the caretaker government of Władysław Wróblewski (PL), the last cabinet appointed by the Regency Council, also stepped down. At Daszyński’s suggestion, Józef Piłsudski appointed Jędrzej Moraczewski prime minister on the night of 17/18 November. The new government (PL) was sworn in and the ministers took over their departments on 18 November, which is why some studies give that date as the start of the cabinet. The period in which Poland had two rival governments, in Warsaw and in Lublin, was over.

Daszyński, the head of the Lublin government, had spent three days trying to build a cabinet with the participation of all parties. The National Democrats, the strongest grouping on the right, did not, however, want a government headed by a socialist, and Wojciech Korfanty opposed him most sharply. Moraczewski was also a socialist, but he was regarded as a candidate the National Democrats could accept. He was born in 1870 in Trzemeszno in the Prussian partition. He was a railway engineer who had studied at the Lwów Polytechnic, one of the leaders of the Galician Polish Social Democratic Party and, from 1907, a deputy to the Austrian parliament. During the war he served in the I Brigade of the Legions, and in the Lublin government he was minister of communications.

The composition of the cabinet was close to that of Lublin. It included socialists, peasant-party politicians from PSL “Wyzwolenie” and “Piast”, and a few non-party experts. Internal affairs were taken over by Stanisław Thugutt, foreign affairs by the socialist Leon Wasilewski, and Wincenty Witos appeared on the cabinet list as minister without portfolio, although he himself claimed in his memoirs that he had refused to take part in both governments, the Lublin one and the Warsaw one. The ministry of military affairs was at first headed by Piłsudski himself. According to an account cited by historians, Piłsudski set Moraczewski two conditions: not to change social relations by decree, and to prepare an electoral law for the Sejm within a week, working on it as if he were digging trenches.

The government set to work quickly. In the following days it introduced the eight-hour working day, and on 28 November an electoral law that gave women the vote and set elections to the Legislative Sejm for January 1919. The right considered the cabinet too radical, the communists bourgeois, and the Entente powers looked unfavourably on a government of men who had cooperated with the Central Powers during the war. Moraczewski headed the government for less than two months.