Sense of Betrayal May Topple Lithuania’s Communists

Dogged by charges of corruption and widely blamed for letting crime get out of hand, the Communists--the ruling party in this former Soviet republic--face likely defeat in Lithuania’s parliamentary elections Sunday.

The first Communists in Eastern Europe to stage a political comeback after the Soviet bloc collapsed, Lithuania’s reformed Communist Party may now earn the dubious honor of becoming the first to be booed back offstage.

A mix of center-right parties in this small, predominantly Catholic nation appears poised to exact revenge after being roundly crushed by the Communists in the last elections in 1992.

Polls suggest that the center-right forces, led by Vytautas Z. Landsbergis, a feisty music professor and opposition leader, should be able to garner enough seats in the 141-seat Parliament to form a government.

“There is already a mood of deep despair in this country,” Landsbergis said. “I don’t want to imagine what the mood will be like if the Communists manage to stay in power.”

This Baltic nation of 3.6 million people won worldwide fame and sympathy in the early 1990s for its gutsy, sometimes harrowing confrontation with Moscow as it struggled to break free from Soviet rule.

But after finally gaining their independence in 1991, Lithuanians shocked observers by turning out the Landsbergis-led government and voting their onetime Communist rulers back into power.

Lithuania’s president, who was not directly involved in this vote, is Algirdas Brazauskas, a former Communist.

What happened here set a pattern that was followed later in Hungary and Poland: The former Communists turned discontent--generated by the shock of economic reforms that followed their defeat--into a means to win back power by promising to protect the new poor from greater hardship.

But surprises were in store for the voters. Once Lithuania’s former Communists settled back into office, they dropped their old economic ways.

They also started slashing government price supports, adopting fiscally conservative budgets and enthusiastically following the austere economic recovery plans drawn up with outside, international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund.

Swiftly becoming more conservative than their conservative rivals, the reformed Communist Party--renamed the Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party--rebuffed opposition suggestions that the state compensate individuals for savings lost to hyperinflation. Instead, they offered stern public lectures on how this approach was wrong and how improper it was for government to tamper with free markets.

Their turnabout austerity has earned the Communists of Lithuania higher economic marks in the international community than any other former Soviet republic--except for the neighboring Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia.

In Lithuania, inflation has plunged from 1,200% a year in 1992 to 25% now. Growth, while not as dramatic as in some emerging markets, should reach a respectable 2% this year.

On the streets of Vilnius, new wealth is visible everywhere--there are posh specialty shops on every corner, while youthful entrepreneurs in BMWs and designer clothes with mobile phones are ubiquitous.

But while the reformed Communists have thrilled the international financial community, the impoverished pensioners and farmers who voted for the party last time are outraged at what they believe is a betrayal.

Far from shielding the poor from hardship, the reformers have halved their purchasing power.

Many pensioners subsist on a barely adequate $50 a month. Farmers, unable to buy fuel at skyrocketing prices, are harnessing up horse and carts again.

The last straw for many voters was the dramatic collapse last year of two of this nation’s top banks. Thousands of individuals and businesses had their savings wiped out overnight.

“People were standing around those banks crying their eyes out,” said Edvardas Turauskas, 49, leaning against a rusty car selling lottery tickets to passers-by. “This government should have seen the banking crisis coming. Everybody now understands that these Communists don’t know what they’re doing.”

Rage against the government intensified when news leaked out that Adolfas Slezevicius, then the reformed Communist prime minister, had withdrawn his personal savings from one of the troubled banks just days before it went belly-up. He resigned under intense public pressure and was replaced by another member of the Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party.

Still, for many Lithuanians, the bank scandal confirmed their worst suspicions--that the former Communists now in power are only trying to get rich quick.

Opposition parties have also won voter favor by blasting the government for failing to rein in spiraling crime.

Landsbergis and his allies have gained strength on voter-pleasing promises of tax cuts and investment incentives. His seeming incorruptibility is also seen as a plus.

But more sophisticated Lithuanians doubt that he really grasps free-market economics. Many worry that the anti-Moscow rhetoric he honed as a nationalist activist--and never relinquished after independence--could put new strains on this nation’s reasonably good relationship with Russia.