TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121090/1210000.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.8 KB | 182 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 48

POLAND

A Stranger Calls


In his bid to become President, Lech Walesa must defeat a
mysterious newcomer who is surprisingly popular with the voter

By RICHARD LACAYO -- Reported by James L. Graff/Warsaw, with
other bureaus


    Dark-horse candidates don't come much darker than Stanislaw
Tyminski, the runner-up in Poland's presidential election last
week. One of the few things voters know about him for sure is
that he doesn't live in Poland. He makes his home in suburban
Toronto, where he owns a computer company and heads the
minuscule Libertarian Party of Canada. He won't even promise
to move back to Poland if he wins this Sunday's runoff
election. He does say he can lift his native land out of its
present economic mess. He just won't say how. For good measure,
he has said Poland should acquire nuclear weapons, the sooner
the better.

    In their first free presidential election, Poles received
a bracing lesson in an event familiar to every democracy: an
upset at the polls. But in Poland's still imperfectly formed
democracy, the result was more upsetting than usual. Though he
was virtually unknown when he launched his campaign three
months ago, Tyminski took second place in a six-man
presidential race that was supposed to be a contest between
Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and his onetime colleague, Prime
Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki. Walesa needed more than 50% of the
vote to avoid a runoff. He won just under 40%, with 23% going
to Tyminski and 18% to Mazowiecki. Now the still mysterious
Tyminski will face Walesa alone on Dec. 9.

    That has sent Walesa hurrying to mend fences with
Mazowiecki, who resigned as Prime Minister one day after his
humiliating third-place finish. Mazowiecki fell victim to voter
despair over the nation's economic chaos. Poland is undergoing
the most radical conversion to private enterprise of any East
European country. But Poles are furious over the attendant
disruptions, including a 200% annual inflation rate and an
increase in unemployment from almost nothing to more than 1
million of the nation's 18 million workers. In their
frustration, many sought scapegoats for their plight: former
Communists, Jews and even the leaders of Solidarity who
wrenched Poland away from communism.

    As head of the Solidarity-led government that came to power
15 months ago, Mazowiecki automatically became a prime target.
Voters contending with a 30% decrease in purchasing power
charged him with prolonging the pain by moving too cautiously
to sell off government-owned businesses and property. Many also
resented his reluctance to bring to trial Poland's old
Communist bosses, some of whom secured control of government
property before it could be privatized. It did not help that he
ran on the sobering platform that there was more pain to come.

    Both Walesa and Tyminski promised to make things better but
never specified how they would accomplish that goal. Walesa
called vaguely for "acceleration" of the transition toward free
markets, decontrolled prices and private property. To that end,
he vowed to be "a President with an ax," one who would force
change through the Polish legislature and even rule by decree
if necessary. But when he talked specifics, he tended to offer
pierogi-in-the-sky proposals like his short-lived promise to
give every worker 100 million zlotys, about $10,000, in
government bonds.

    Walesa also played on the anti-Semitism that popped up
repeatedly in the campaign. Though Poland's Jewish community
numbers about 5,000, accusations that Jews are behind the
nation's travails are common. When Walesa supporters complained
that Jews in high places were hiding their ancestry, he made
a winking reply about the need for "clarity." Mazowiecki was
one of those rumored to be part Jewish. In one of the
campaign's most dismal moments, the bishop of Mazowiecki's
hometown of Plock felt called upon to affirm the Prime
Minister's Catholic ancestry all the way back to the 15th
century.

    After Solidarity candidates swept last year's parliamentary
elections, it was Walesa who chose Mazowiecki, then a close
adviser, to serve as Prime Minister. Walesa expected to be a
power behind the throne, but Mazowiecki kept his old colleague
at arm's length. Walesa brought his resentment onto the
campaign trail, complaining at one rally that though he had a
special phone line installed at his Gdansk headquarters to
connect him with Mazowiecki's office, "it never rang." With his
hearty manner and working-class accent, Walesa derided
Mazowiecki as an intellectual out of touch with ordinary Poles.

    Faced with this battle between two former friends, many
voters saw in Tyminski, 42, a new face and a successful
businessman who seemed to embody their hopes for prosperity.
NEITHER ONE NOR THE OTHER, read Tyminski's campaign posters.
"People didn't vote for a Western millionaire," says Piotr
Aleksandrowicz, deputy chief editor of the Warsaw daily
Rzeczpospolita. "They voted against the Establishment and for
their own dreams." But it was Tyminski who got their votes,
running especially well among younger and rural voters and in
areas like the coal-mining city of Katowice, hit hard by the
government's austerity plan.

    Yet Poles knew almost nothing about him. Only now is a more
detailed profile emerging -- and its shape is strange and
sometimes contradictory. Tyminski slipped out of Poland in
1969, apparently on a tourist visa, and eventually reached
Canada, where he studied computer science. In 1975 he founded
his own company, Transduction Ltd., which makes computer
systems for factories and power plants. Traveling to Peru in
1982, he stayed on for six years, eventually starting a cable
TV company. There he met his wife Graciela and also apparently
underwent a kind of spiritual transformation among the Peruvian
Indians.

    By last week, however, details surfaced that contradicted
some of Tyminski's accounts. He initially claimed that after
leaving Poland, he did not return until last year. But the
pro-Solidarity paper Gazeta Wyborcza cited government records
that showed he visited the country seven times between 1980 and
1989 -- with the visa for each trip obtained from the Polish
embassy in Tripoli, Libya. Tyminski called the reports "a lie,
a lie and a lie."

    Tyminski's showing has piqued interest in his book, Sacred
Dogs, a truculent 260-page call to arms that he published at
his own expense last summer. Oddly, the fervently pro-business
book is dedicated to Roman Samsel, the former Latin American
correspondent for Trybuna Ludu, the Polish Communist Party
newspaper. Samsel remains a key figure in Tyminski's campaign.
"That kind of association ought to raise a lot of eyebrows in
Poland," says a Western diplomat. At the least, it has fed
unsubstantiated rumors that Tyminski had links to the former
Communist government's secret service. No less disturbingly,
the book devotes an entire chapter to Tyminski's call for Poland
to arm itself with 100 medium-range nuclear missiles "so that
we can work in peace and feel ourselves fully independent and
equal to other free countries."

    Walesa is still the favorite in next week's vote, but a
victory could turn out to be a mixed blessing for him and for
Poland. "Walesa can't produce an economic miracle, and that's
exactly what the people expect," says Stanislaw Stomma, a
member of the Polish Senate. "Tadeusz got used up, and now it's
Walesa's turn." Some fear that the difficulty of delivering on
people's hopes for economic revival will eventually prompt
Walesa to abuse the undefined presidential powers in the new
constitution, which is still being drafted. During the campaign
Walesa hinted he would rule by decree if necessary. For one of
his campaign posters he used a photograph of himself closely
modeled after a famous picture of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the
hero who expelled the Soviet army from Poland in 1920 and
became dictator after a coup d'etat in 1926.

    The fear that Walesa might play the strongman led many of
his old Solidarity comrades to turn against him. Even as they
close ranks behind him to head off a Tyminski victory, some are
still wary. "Of all the postcommunist countries, Poland alone
had a broad democratic movement like Solidarity, which we hoped
would prepare us for any setbacks," says Bronislaw Geremek,
once a close adviser to Walesa who later allied himself with
Mazowiecki. "This election proves that Poland, like all the
others, must confront the authoritarian temptation." Next week
it must also confront the temptation to cast its fate with a
mysterious stranger, one who turned up suddenly to offer a
dubious promise of salvation.