Sanation (, ) was a Polish political movement that was created in the interwar period, prior to Józef Piłsudski's May 1926 Coup d'État, and came to power in the wake of that coup. In 1928 its political activists would go on to form the Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government (BBWR).
The Sanation movement took its name from Piłsudski's aspirations for a moral "sanation" (healing) of the Polish body politic. The movement functioned integrally until his death in 1935. Following Piłsudski's death, Sanation split into several competing factions, including "the Castle" (President Ignacy Mościcki and his partisans).
Sanation, which advocated authoritarian rule, rested on a circle of Piłsudski's close associates, including Walery Sławek, Aleksander Prystor, Kazimierz Świtalski, Janusz Jędrzejewicz, Adam Koc, Józef Beck, Tadeusz Hołówko, Bogusław Miedziński, and Edward Rydz-Śmigły. It preached the primacy of the national interest in governance, and contended against the system of parliamentary democracy.
Background
Named after the Latin word for "healing" ("sanatio"), the Sanation movement mainly comprised former military officers who were disgusted with the perceived corruption in Polish politics. Sanation was a coalition of rightists, leftists and centrists whose main focus was the elimination of corruption and the reduction of inflation.
Sanation appeared prior to the May 1926 Coup d'État and lasted until World War II but was never formalized. Piłsudski, though he had been the former leader of the Polish Socialist Party, had grown to disapprove of political parties, which he saw as promoting their own interests rather than supporting the state and the people. For this reason, the Sanation movement never led to the creation of a political party. Instead, in 1928 Sanation members created a Bezpartyjny Blok Współpracy z Rządem ("Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government"), a pro-government grouping that denied being a political party.
History
Although Piłsudski never claimed personal power, he exercised extensive influence over Polish politics after Sanation took power in 1926. For the next decade, he dominated Polish affairs as strongman of a generally popular centrist regime. Kazimierz Bartel's government and all subsequent governments were first unofficially approved by Piłsudski before they could be confirmed by the President.
In the course of pursuing "sanation", Piłsudski mixed democratic and authoritarian elements. Poland's internal stability was enhanced, while economic stagnation was ended by Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski's reforms. At the same time, the Sanation regime prosecuted communist parties (on the ostensible formal grounds that they had failed to legally register as political parties) and sought to limit the influence of opposition parties by splitting their forces.
A distinguishing feature of the regime was that, unlike the situation in most of non-democratic Europe, it never transformed itself into a full-scale dictatorship. Freedom of speech and press and political parties were never legally abolished, and opponents were usually dealt with via "unidentified perpetrators" rather than court sentences. Sanation allowed the 1928 election to be relatively free, but was dealt a setback when its supporters in the BBWR came up far short of a majority. Before the 1930 election some opposition parties united into the Centrolew coalition, calling for a violent overthrow of the government; Sanacja reacted by arresting more than 20 prominent opposition leaders that participated in Centrolew. Under these conditions, the BBWR won over 46 percent of the vote and a large majority in both houses.
Józef Piłsudski's personal cult stemmed from his general popularity among the nation rather than from top-down propaganda; this is notable, considering Piłsudski's disdain for democracy. Sanation's ideology never went beyond populist calls to clean up the country's politics and economy; it did not occupy itself with society, as was the case with contemporary fascist regimes. From 1929, the semi-official newspaper of Sanation, and thus of the Polish government, was Gazeta Polska (the Polish Gazette).