Warsaw city council elections

At eight in the evening on 14 July 1916 the polling stations in Warsaw closed. Voting was ending in the elections to the city council, the first elections to the city’s government in decades. They had been called by the German occupiers, and the councillors were elected in six curiae, in which the vote of a tenement owner counted many times more than that of a worker. The council met for the first time on 24 July.

Self-government from the occupier

After the January Uprising the towns of the Kingdom of Poland lost their self-government, and their municipal offices were run by officials appointed by the Russians. In the spring of 1915 the tsar approved a law giving the towns of the Kingdom elected councils, but before elections could be held the Russians left Warsaw. After the Germans entered in August 1915, the city was run by the Citizens’ Committee, and the president of Warsaw was Prince Zdzisław Lubomirski. The Governor-General, Hans von Beseler, who wanted to win over the Poles, agreed to replace the Committee with an elected council. On 8 April 1916 he extended Warsaw’s boundaries, more than tripling the city’s area, and in May the occupation authorities gave the city a municipal ordinance with electoral rules.

The ordinance was far from democratic. Men aged 25 or over who had lived in Warsaw for at least two years could vote, and men over thirty with fluent Polish could stand. The voters were divided into six curiae, each electing 15 councillors, 90 in all. Separate curiae were given to property owners, large industry and commerce, the intelligentsia (lawyers, teachers, physicians, engineers, clergy), craftsmen and small merchants, and tenants paying the housing tax. The sixth curia took in everyone else, mainly workers. According to figures based on the press of the time, about 82,000 people registered to vote, more than 51,000 of them in the sixth curia and just over 1,000 in the curia of large industry and commerce, although both elected the same number of councillors.

The Polish-Jewish agreement

The Jewish question stirred the strongest feelings. Jews made up more than a third of Warsaw’s inhabitants. Since the 1912 elections to the Russian Duma, after which National Democracy declared a boycott of Jewish trade, Polish-Jewish relations in the city had been very tense. This time the Polish groupings and the Jewish bloc, which brought together Zionists, the Orthodox and assimilationists, came to terms. Under an agreement concluded at the end of June they divided the seats in four curiae between them: according to the breakdown on the English Wikipedia, of the 60 seats 26 went to the national committee, 19 to the democratic committee and 15 to the Jews. As a single joint list was put forward in these curiae, no vote was held in them. Stefan Kieniewicz later wrote that had a similar compromise been reached in 1912, the Polish cause would have lost nothing by it.

Not everyone accepted the agreement. A group of Yiddish writers and journalists led by the lawyer Noach Pryłucki formed the People’s Committee (Folks-Komitet), which put up its own list and called for independent Jewish politics, cultural autonomy and full equality. The socialists, Polish and Jewish, also put up their own lists.

The vote

Elections were therefore held in only two curiae. The intelligentsia voted on 10–12 July in the city hall, the Jabłonowski Palace, separately by professional group. Among those elected was the rector of the revived University of Warsaw, Józef Brudziński. In the sixth curia, the largest, voting took place on 13 and 14 July, depending on the first letter of the voter’s surname. According to figures of the time, turnout was about 72 per cent.

According to the results reported in the Warsaw press, in the sixth curia the list of National Democracy and its allies won 7 seats, Pryłucki’s People’s Committee 4, the PPS–Revolutionary Faction 2, and the joint list of the Bund and the PPS–Left and the SDKPiL one each. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the People’s Committee’s success reflected the discontent of small traders and craftsmen. It was the first great victory of the movement from which the Jewish Folkspartei (PL) grew. The National Democratic press called the People’s Committee’s result a victory for Jewish nationalism.

The first council

On 24 July 1916 the new council held its first session. Lubomirski remained president of the city, and Brudziński became chairman of the council. The council was now to run the affairs of a city suffering from hunger, unemployment and requisitions, although the final word still lay with the German occupation authorities. In December 1916 the first elections to town councils were also held in the Austro-Hungarian zone of occupation, among others in Radom, Kielce and Lublin.