The result of the second round of the presidential elections witnesses the defeat
Confronted by an inconsistent candidate, whose sole merit was that of serving as an expression of social discontent, the leader-symbol of received the support of 39.65% of those eligible to vote! In this first free nationwide election 47% of the electors took refuge in abstention whereas more than 13% of eligible voters chose to support the eccentric Tyminski. The victory of Walesa, obtained in such conditions, is indicative of disorders to come. And his goal — to gain the people's acceptance of the suffering necessary for the reestablishment of capitalism by participation and social manipulation — is not yet won.
It is among the youth and the workers that Walesa's challenger obtained the highest percentages of the vote - 30% of voters under 25 and 26% of workers taking part in the vote declared their support for Tyminski. The later obtained his best scores in Higher Silesia, the industrial heart of Poland and in the rural regions of Greater Poland. At Elblag, city of the first important investments of foreign capital (the Swiss-Swedish holding ABB has recently taken over the Zamech enterprise there, one of the most important of the city) Tyminski received 35.7% of the votes. These figures reflect the disarray which is particularly strong among the young workers.
The zealous application of the recipes of the International Monetary Fund has led to a lowering of 30% in industrial production, a reduction of the real average wage of the order of 35%, and a vertiginous rise in unemployment, which has already passed — before the big waves of dismissals linked to privatization - the threshold of a million. The social deficit which had overshadowed Mazowiecki in the first round of the presidential election has
The latter has suffered also from the democratic deficit. In voting for the candidates of Solidarnosc in the June 1989 electhemselves for democracy. They could then have only a single reference to this hope — that of the democracy which reigned inside Solidarnosc in 1980-81. A democracy from below, with election and representatives, around workplace collectives capable of influencing the decisions taken at the summit. A decentralized democracy, where each link - in the workplace as in the region — was sovereign and could reject the decision of the superior echelon if it went against its interests.
This memory, at the same time blurred and idealized during the decade of the state of emergency, was the sole experience of democracy on a mass scale that the great majority of the population knew. Far from corresponding to this ideal, the parliamentary democracy installed in Poland has been that of the absence of alternatives, justified in a language mixing pseudo-scientific argumentation and an authoritarian morality, all the more 25 authoritarian when its actors felt them-
itself has maintained a complete silence
International Viewpoint #197 • December 24, 1990