Word: communist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Sejm, the governing lower house of Parliament, tackled the task of electing a Prime Minister to head the new government. President Wojciech Jaruzelski chose Interior Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak for the post. But Kiszczak ran into such fierce resistance from both the Solidarity opposition and some legislators allied with the Communists that frantic politicking continued right down to the wire. Communist leaders pressured their rebellious allies within the United Peasant Alliance, offering important positions and threatening to retract privileges. The tactics paid off. When the vote was counted Wednesday, Kiszczak emerged on top: 237 to 173, with ten abstentions...
Thus Poland once again strode to the brink of a political abyss, then pulled back. Legislators opted to make the best of the bargain struck at the round- table talks three months ago, when Communist Party and Solidarity leaders agreed on the broad outlines of a program for achieving political pluralism and a more open economy. That meant, among other things, a continuation of Communist Party rule. Acceptance of the scheme has been grudging at best, and its future course is anything but certain. The delicate political balance is threatened by radicals within Solidarity who are itching to leave...
Given the inherent frictions between the Communists and the opposition, it is questionable whether any Communist candidate for Prime Minister would have coasted to victory. Even so, some Solidarity legislators found Kiszczak, 63, particularly tough to take. During his eight-year tenure as Interior Minister, Kiszczak controlled the police and paramilitary forces and was responsible for hunting down and jailing Solidarity activists during the martial-law crackdown that began in 1981. Many of those activists are now seated in the Sejm...
...realize such sweeping changes, the Communist Party must secure the cooperation not only of Solidarity but of its own allies as well. However, as last week's threatened defection by the Peasants demonstrated, there is growing impatience with the compromise implicit in the round-table agreement. Observed the Solidarity daily Gazeta Wyborcza in an editorial: "Society does not understand why the new Cabinet, which would like to call itself a government of national salvation, should be headed by a representative of a party responsible for creating the situation from which society must be saved...
...days before the conference opened, a parley among the four warring Cambodian factions broke down just hours after it began. The talks were resumed by the factions -- the country's Vietnamese-backed government, represented by Prime Minister Hun Sen, and a resistance coalition that includes two non-Communist groups under Prince Norodom Sihanouk andnationalist leader Son Sann, as well as the Khmer Rouge -- only after they finally agreed to sit together at this ^ week's conference under the single name Cambodia...