Polish Turnout Light in Free Elections : Democratization: The ‘second half of the revolution’ fails to lure many voters. Officials hold firm against rail strike.

Voter turnout was surprisingly light Sunday as Poles voted to elect 52,000 local officeholders in the first fully free elections here since World War II.

Despite government pleas for voters to turn out and complete the “second half of the revolution” that began last year, the turnout was only 42% nationwide, the General Election Commission reported.

The election was carried out as the government continued to stand firm against a wildcat strike of railway workers, now a week old. The strikers have cut off freight transport to seaports on the Baltic coast and threatened Sunday to mount a 90-minute nationwide work stoppage today.

The workers say they will press for a broader strike if their demands for increased pay and a housecleaning in the railroad’s management are not met by the government.

The government has steadfastly refused to negotiate pay increases, arguing that its plan for sweeping economic reforms would be jeopardized by caving in to the railway workers.

Solidarity leader Lech Walesa met with the strikers from midnight to 3 a.m. Saturday but failed to resolve the dispute. He urged the strikers to give up their protest and go back to work, saying he is in sympathy with their demands but arguing that the strike threatens the Solidarity-based government.

“Please call off the strike,” he told the workers in Slupsk, in northern Poland. “Do it for Poland. We don’t want a civil war now, and what’s going on now is leading to it.”

Walesa, who has had his differences with the Solidarity-led government of Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, voiced for the workers what has been the position of the government and its supporters in the Polish press, which has advocated continued resistance to the wage demands.

The government cannot back down, Walesa said, “because there are others waiting in line for strikes.” Talks between the government and the strikers broke off Saturday after Labor Minister Jacek Kuron held firm on the government’s stand because the dispute is seen as a test of the government’s resolve.

“I am willing to talk with everybody,” Kuron said, “about everything except wages. . . . There will be no change in the government’s stand.”

The strike, so far, has not generated any widespread public sympathy, possibly because most Poles are bearing the same burdens of austerity imposed by the Mazowiecki government and have become convinced of the need to carry them through, despite the hardship.

In Poland’s Communist past, strikes were an effective political weapon, staggering a succession of Communist regimes. But the new Solidarity government, in power since last August, has been hoping to break that tradition and saw Sunday’s elections as a vital step to build democracy from the ground up in cities and towns across the country.

Solidarity candidates were expected to fare best in the elections, but more than half of the candidates in the local elections were running as independents. About 1,000 parties, most of them minuscule, fielded candidates. In all, election officials said, 152,000 candidates were running.

Adam Michnik, editor of Solidarity’s daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, was among those figures in the government, or close to it, who urged Poles to take part in an election of “such breakthrough significance.”

“We ourselves will choose those who will govern in districts and towns,” he said.

In an effort to return centralized authority to local governments, about one-fifth of the state-controlled property in Poland will be turned over to local officials.

The reconstituted Communist Party, now called the Social Democracy Party, took part in the elections, spending conspicuously on campaign posters, but was not expected to do well in the vote.

Voting in Warsaw, Prime Minister Mazowiecki described the elections as fundamental. “Local government elections will not change the economic situation,” he said. “But we can say they are changing the system.”

Full results of the voting are not expected to be known until Wednesday.