How much were the Polish people agitated by the price hikes and increased poverty due to the infamous shock therapy

They were very agitated, but the communists returned largely because of the rapid disintegration of the opposition into multiple strands, a result partly due to different ideologies having been papered over out of combined hatred for the regime, and partly personal cliques and rivalries. First the 'wojna na gorze' between Walesa (backed by the twins, the right in general, and the bulk of the working class anti-communist opposition activists) and Mazowiecki (backed by the the bulk of the organized intellectual opposition that had emerged in the seventies as well as some of those working class activists that had worked with them pre-Solidarity) in 1990, then the splintering of the pro-Walesa groups over the first half of 1992.

The post-communists won the election with twenty percent of the vote, better than the twelve percent they'd gotten in 1991, but not exactly a resounding popular endorsement. The post Solidarity parties got a good fifty percent, but the right wing ones were mostly shut out of parliament because they were so splintered they didn't make it past the threshold.