Word: kwasniewski
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Like other reformed communists, Kwasniewski owes much of his success to the pain caused by economic and political transformation. Five years of double- and sometimes triple-digit inflation wiped out savings, privatization eliminated jobs, the collapse of the police state allowed crime to flourish, and cash-strapped governments cut back on social services. "Conspicuous consumption," says Oxford University's Timothy Garton Ash, has coincided with "conspicuous immiserization...
...mere misery that defeated Walesa. Kwasniewski's appeal was more to youth and the future than to the stern stability of the communist past. His movie-star good looks and pleasant manner contrasted with a graying, truculent Walesa, who directed his appeal to a Polish Catholic conservatism that is going out of style. "It's more true that Walesa lost the election than that Kwasniewski won it," says Bronislaw Geremek, chairman of the Sejm's Foreign Affairs Committee...
...Kwasniewski did. He and his supporters ran a media-savvy campaign modeled on U.S. politics, complete with sound-bite-size speech lines and punchy TV spots. Kwasniewski responded to Walesa's rough arrogance with gentle gibes. "I appreciate Mr. Walesa's achievements," he remarked. "But he reminds me of an athlete who keeps harking back to the fact that he once won a gold medal." The challenger's strategy worked. "Symbolically, Kwasniewski represented modernity and change," says Wiktor Osiatynski, a Polish historian. "It is a corrupted modernity with a communist past on its back, but it's still modernity...
...After Kwasniewski's win, messages of congratulations poured in from many nations, including the members of nato and the E.U. None dwelt on his party past. "It's not the background or the personal experience of the candidates, it is the policies that they will pursue in the future," said Mike McCurry, the White House spokesman. "And on that point, President-elect Kwasniewski has been very clear...
Giving President Lech Walesa what he described as "a slap on the cheek," Polish voters elected his challenger, Alexander Kwasniewski, with 51.7% of the vote. A former communist, Kwasniewski, 41, campaigned as a pro-Western, reform-minded Social Democrat. Said he: "The divisions between those who are former communists and those who were with Solidarity are not so important outside the intellectual circles of Warsaw...