Walesa Headed for Landslide Polish Victory

Lech Walesa, the shipyard electrician who led Poland’s fight against Communist rule for the last decade, was elected president Sunday by a landslide margin, according to partial, official returns that showed him winning by 77%.

Exit polls projected that Walesa would maintain that 77%, decisively trouncing his mysterious dark-horse opponent, Polish emigre and Canadian businessman Stanislaw Tyminski. The exit polls projected a vote of 23% for Tyminski.

It was the country’s first popular presidential election. In free elections before World War II, Poland’s presidents were always elected by Parliament.

Among jubilant supporters at his hometown headquarters in Gdansk, Walesa, 47, and his wife Danuta, raised glasses of champagne. “I am aware that we face difficult tasks,” Walesa said. “But if we managed to overcome the previous system without firing a shot, without blood being spilled, then we can dare to build another one. We have 10 years of experience.”

At his headquarters in Warsaw, Tyminski said he was “surprised” by the result. “I expected to get about 50%,” he said. He also charged that the “situation was dangerous” and that his supporters were “terrorized” and “beaten up.”

Tyminski, 42, left Poland 21 years ago and established businesses in Canada and Peru. His second-place finish in the first round of voting two weeks ago, when he knocked Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki out of the running, threw a deep scare into the country’s political establishment. In the ensuing campaign for Sunday’s runoff election, Tyminski came under intense scrutiny over his alleged ties with former Communists and secret police operatives, his vague economic ideas and his assertions that mystical experiences among Peruvian Indians had given him access to a “fourth dimension” of reality.

While Tyminski never explained how the “fourth dimension” might benefit Poland, commentators, noting his expressionless face and icy stare, suggested that he was adept at self-hypnosis. One British journalist called him “the candidate from ‘Twin Peaks.’ ”

The brief Tyminski phenomenon, which Walesa referred to as “an accident on the road to democracy,” had the effect of pulling together, at least temporarily, the split factions of Solidarity, pulled asunder by the often bitter campaign battle between Mazowiecki and Walesa. Virtually all the important figures in the Mazowiecki camp, led by the prime minister himself, endorsed Walesa in the runoff.

The triumph for Walesa is the culmination of a remarkable career. Born in a shack at the edge of a bog in northern Poland, one of seven children in his impoverished family, Walesa’s formal education ended with a trade school course in auto mechanics. He left home at the age of 24 and went to work in the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk. Within a short time, he was agitating against poor working conditions. He was fired from the shipyard in 1976 for criticizing the Communist unions, but he continued his agitations underground, convinced that it would be possible, one day, to organize free trade unions. The chance came in 1980, with the outbreak of a strike in the shipyard. In a move he refers to often, the unemployed Walesa jumped the shipyard fence to join the strikers. Within days, he was leading them.

When Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law in December, 1981, Solidarity was banned and Walesa was jailed for a year. In July, 1983, martial law was lifted. That same year, Walesa received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Through most of the deep gloom that settled over Poland in the post-martial law period, scores of underground activists kept Solidarity alive, and Walesa, more than any other figure, was its voice to the outside world. Beginning with a series of strikes in 1988, Solidarity rose again, with Walesa leading a deft series of negotiations that legalized the trade union, thus setting the stage for elections that would spell doom for the Communists.

In the aftermath of those elections, it was Walesa who pushed the cautious Solidarity brain trust, composed of Mazowiecki and other opposition intellectuals, to form a government. Walesa handpicked Mazowiecki to take the premiership. It was a step that foreshadowed six months of revolution in Eastern Europe in which hard-line Communist regimes surrendered power in Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and, finally, Romania.

Causes of the Communist collapse included an apparently endless economic crisis and the reforms brought about by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, although the determination of Walesa in Poland was seen as a major catalytic force. Walesa did not take a role in the new government and declined to run for Parliament, and it was obvious to Poles that Walesa was waiting for the presidency. Under the negotiated arrangement with the Communists, the presidency went to Jaruzelski, the former Communist Party leader.

Back in Gdansk, Walesa’s only official role was as the leader of Solidarity, but he acted very much as a president-in-waiting, receiving streams of visiting dignitaries, foreign ministers and heads of state. At the same time, Solidarity’s liberal wing, most of it either in or close to the government, began sniping at Walesa as a “loose cannon” and an “autocrat,” clearly aiming to ambush Walesa’s obvious presidential ambitions, setting the stage for an acrimonious campaign that has taken up virtually the whole of this year.

Walesa made “acceleration” his slogan for the campaign, arguing that the dead wood of Communist bureaucracy, still clogging the middle or upper-middle levels of industry and government, needs to be cleaned out. He painted his old ally, Mazowiecki, as dedicated but too cautious.

It was a view the electorate appeared to share. Mazowiecki received only 17% of the vote in the first round, coming in third behind Tyminski.

Walesa will now have the task of making good on his word to speed up Polish reforms, while laying to rest apprehensions over his autocratic style of leadership. Mazowiecki and other Solidarity liberals, forming a new alliance of political parties, have pledged to create a watchful opposition.

Poland’s new president could be sworn in as early as Wednesday. Jaruzelski, whose 1981 decree sent Walesa to jail for a year, would relinquish the post the moment Walesa is sworn in.