Word: sejm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...visit his native country in June, Poland's Roman Catholic prelates busied themselves preparing a present for their Pontiff: strict antiabortion legislation that would ban the procedure completely, including cases stemming from rape and incest. The antiabortion bill, which the church lobbied for mightily in the Polish Sejm, or lower house of parliament, prescribed jail terms for doctors who performed abortions, even on women whose lives were endangered by pregnancy...
Given the predominance of Catholics in Poland -- 97% of the country's 38 million people -- the church had numbers and influence on its side, and a more moderate version of the bill had already passed the Senate. But when the time , came for a vote last week, the Sejm, lobbied by Solidarity veterans and former communists, postponed a decision. Instead, the lower house opted for a nonbinding resolution calling on the government to ban private abortions and decrying the country's high abortion rate. With a vote unlikely till after his visit, John Paul will have to settle for another...
...passed a bill that would impose a prison term of as much as two years on anyone performing the procedure unless the pregnancy threatened the mother's life or stemmed from rape or incest. Several variants on that bill, many of them even stiffer, are being considered by the Sejm, the lower house, which is due to vote this week on whether to submit the question to a national referendum. Earlier this month, the bishops' conference condemned that option. Meanwhile, the government has ended subsidies for birth-control pills. That move, which many suspect was church inspired, will triple...
...freer elections than those that had been held since World War II. Solidarity turned itself into a political party -- the first true opposition in the Soviet bloc -- so it could contest all 100 seats in the new Senate and 161 of the seats in the lower chamber, the Sejm. In June Solidarity won all but one of the contested seats. In August, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, editor of Solidarity's weekly newspaper, was sworn in as the first noncommunist Prime Minister in Eastern Europe since Stalin had imposed his system there 40 years ago. Society -- led, with appropriate irony, by the workers...