[1] The party's goal was to prevent the communists from monopolizing power in Poland, establish a parliamentary system with market economy and to win free elections, which were promised by the Yalta agreements.

The hopes of the PSL were based on the party's ability to function legally, run its own network of offices, hold public meetings and publish in its own press.

However, such accomplishments were threatened by the often intense harassment and repression, including newspaper censorship, forcible breaking up of party's meetings, and members' arrests, assaults and police intimidation.

[1][2] In actuality, the PSL press condemned the nationalistic and other armed underground, calling them reactionaries, fascists or bandits and considering the murders and other violent actions committed by them to be criminal acts.

Mikołajczyk approved the fundamental aspects of the communist-led reform and hoped for the system's democratic evolution, but kept his distance from the communist politics of power.

[2] The government in exile, no longer internationally recognized, but holding onto its claim of exclusive legitimacy, renounced Mikołajczyk, its former chief, and declared him a traitor.

[1] However, the most important and numerous anti-communist underground organization Freedom and Independence (WiN), which originated from the wartime Home Army, practically supported the PSL and its election effort.

Freedom and Independence helped with distribution of printed election materials where obstructed by communist officials and appealed for voting for the PSL.

Such factors made the post-war peasant leaders, more than the representatives of other segments of Polish society, inclined to consider compromise political solutions.

Mikołajczyk's political compromises went as far as voting together with the communists, as a government member in 1946, for taking away the Polish citizenship from the upper rank military officers who failed to return to Poland from the West after the war.

After Mikołaczyk's rejection of the scheme had become clear, Stalin instructed Poland's president Bolesław Bierut to "allow" the PSL only 7% of the vote in the upcoming national parliamentary election.

[3] Others in the leadership, notably the prewar activists Czesław Wycech and Józef Niećko, felt that in order for the movement to survive, the situation required a more pragmatic approach.

[4][b] In the eyes of the US Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane and Western leaders in general, the Polish events, characterized by Mikołajczyk after his flight from Poland as rape, meant the denial of illusions of Soviet political trustworthiness.