Ex-Communist Leader Wins Lithuania Vote

Lithuanians seeking salvation from their painful post-Soviet economic decline restored their former Communist chief to power on Sunday, according to unofficial returns.

Algirdas Brazauskas, now leader of the revamped Democratic Labor Party, appeared to have persuaded the majority of Lithuanians to forgive his Communist past and trust him to pull the country out of economic crisis. With almost all of the votes counted in the presidential election, Brazauskas had almost 60% of the total to about 39% for his opponent, Stasys Lozoraitis.

Lithuania, the feisty Baltic state of 3.7 million that was the first to declare independence from the Soviet Union three years ago, could have been expected to be the last to welcome a return of Communist rule.

But Brazauskas, a 60-year-old economist with a bullish build and calm, blue-eyed charisma, had painted himself as a pragmatist who never really subscribed to Communist ideology. He promised to bring Lithuanians relief from the economic disorder that has ravaged both industry and agriculture.

“We need to make a life for our people, not live on ideas,” he told a cheering crowd on a recent campaign swing through the northern town of Birzai. Brazauskas has pledged hefty subsidies for agriculture and improved trade with Lithuania’s neighbors as well as increased aid to the poor.

Lozoraitis carried more appeal for Lithuania’s hard-core nationalists and young people, but he faced a serious handicap. As a lifelong diplomat who lobbied for Lithuania’s freedom at the Vatican and who is now Lithuania’s ambassador to the United States, the learned, bespectacled Lozoraitis has spent only four of his 68 years in Lithuania--during high school.

Many Lithuanians felt as if they did not know him and that, because he had not shared their hardships, he could not know them.

Although Lozoraitis emphasized that he was an independent candidate, he was also hurt by his association with Vytautas Landsbergis, a music professor who led Lithuania’s drive for freedom from the Soviet Union, only to fail overwhelmingly in recent parliamentary elections.

Lithuanians’ desire to retain their independence remains as stubborn as ever. But when the end of cheap, Russian-supplied fuel meant they could no longer afford to heat their houses, and when agricultural production dropped by at least 30% and industrial output by half, they turned away from Landsbergis.

Residents of Vilnius, the capital, can count on their fingers the number of days that the city has supplied them with hot water this snowy winter.

Farmers in Lithuania’s rich countryside reeled under hasty land reform, and industry suffered under exorbitant taxes. Suddenly, the more comfortable past under Brazauskas was looking better and better.

In parliamentary elections this fall and winter, Lithuanians handed Brazauskas’ Democratic Labor Party an outright majority, and he has served as acting president since November.

As full president, he would have the power to appoint a prime minister, to dissolve Parliament if it passed a no-confidence vote in his government and to have a hand in foreign affairs and other state policy.

Despite Brazauskas’ broad appeal, his Communist background and promises to ease Lithuania’s transition to a market economy by spreading around subsidies had skeptics worried on Sunday.

Lithuania could eventually be as prosperous as the United States, American-born entrepreneur Rita Dapkus said at her new pizza kitchen. But “if Brazauskas gets in, it may not happen in the next 10 years.”