COLUMN RIGHT : Polish Voters Buy Free Market Ideas : Tyminski tells them he’ll show them how to succeed in business.

Stanislaw Tyminski offered the Polish people his program: immediate changeover to a capitalist economy and, as a consequence, business prosperity. Lech Walesa’s campaign manager Jacek Merkel attacked Tyminski’s program as a delusive “dream.” Walesa scorned him as a “millionaire sent to us from God knows where.” But Tyminski came in second in this week’s presidential balloting, ahead of sitting Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki and forced Walesa into a surprise run-off.

A person of “immense integrity” is how Roma Kelembet, president of the Libertarian Party of Canada, describes Tyminski, who is the party’s political spokesman. Tyminski has made gaffes and blunders, and has sometimes shown poor judgment that might have knocked an American presidential contender out of the race. It is difficult to see why a person like Tyminski, who holds libertarian principles, is unwilling to condemn the martial law regime of the 1980s. Nonetheless, the Polish emigrant appealed to voters as an outsider who knows how capitalism works. In September he returned to Poland after 20 years as an emigrant to promote his book “Sacred Dogs” on the barriers to Polish prosperity and on how to succeed in business. Tyminski told Kelembet the night before he left for Poland, “If I can change 100 Polish minds to ‘think free,’ it will have been worth it.”

Key to Tyminski’s success was his campaign style, his business background and his best-selling book. He ran a Western-style political campaign. Viewers liked his television programs best. Small-business owners liked his call for lower taxes. His impoverished countrymen, especially in rural areas, admired experience as an entreuprenuer in Canada and peru.

This background contrasted sharply with the common Solidarity labor union background of his two principal opponents and their similar economic programs of austerity and sacrifice. Tyminski capitalized on this similarity with the slogan “Neither one nor the other: Vote Tyminski.” Poles had also enthusiastically bought his how-to guide to private enterprise.

In mid-October Tyminski was telling the voters of Poland that he had returned to his homeland to help create a “system of common sense”--a system that would provide a “prosperous future” for the children of Poland’s citizens.

Tyminski’s message was straightforward and hardhitting. Polish people have to pay their own way in the world. There is no more “free lunch.”

Tyminski told the electorate about foreign trade and the centrality of exports in future Polish prosperity. He talked about changes that needed to be made in Polish agricultural and monetary policy. He stressed the importance of a middle class in the capitalist society that should be built in Poland. He condemned the technocratic prescriptions of Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, whose suggestions have influenced Polish government policy and who approves of its current economic course.

Tyminski said bureaucrats must learn new ways and take on productive jobs. Too many Poles, he says, don’t think for themselves but are accustomed to have others think for them. In his book, Tyminski says that a successful Poland has to think of itself as a kind of guerrilla fighter. Poles should be alert, flexible, take the initiative and better utilize the strength and resources they already have.

Tyminski promised a government that would “free the forces and energy” that he says must be harnessed if Poland is to lift itself out of the economic abyss.

Tyminski argued that if socialist policies continued to bleed the country dry and socialistic attitudes continued to block productivity, foreign investors would buy up the assets in the country and simply treat Poles as a pool of cheap labor. The press has reported this warning and prediction incorrectly. It portrayed Tyminski as opposed to foreign investment. He was in fact warning Poles that a future of Third World-style poverty awaited them if they did not pull up their bootstraps and develop a market-oriented business mentality.

Polish voters saw a man who left his native country because he saw no economic future for himself under communism. He is now a self-made millionaire who wants to put them on the path to becoming successful capitalists. According to Polish public opinion polls, 56% of those surveyed would trust their money to Tyminski rather than to the other candidates to invest. The voters heard Tyminski smeared by his opponents as a certified lunatic, a drug smuggler and a agent of Moammar Kadafi or the KGB. But many of them voted for him anyway, convinced that of the candidates Tyminski alone knows how a market economy works and how to succeed in a competitive world.