Word: tyminski
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Dark-horse candidates don't come much darker than Stanislaw Tyminski, the runner-up in Poland's presidential election last week. One of the few things voters know about him for sure is that he doesn't live in Poland. He makes his home in suburban Toronto, where he owns a computer company and heads the minuscule Libertarian Party of Canada. He won't even promise to move back to Poland if he wins this Sunday's runoff election. He does say he can lift his native land out of its present economic mess. He just...
...first free presidential election, Poles received a bracing lesson in an event familiar to every democracy: an upset at the polls. But in Poland's still imperfectly formed democracy, the result was more upsetting than usual. Though he was virtually unknown when he launched his campaign three months ago, Tyminski took second place in a six-man presidential race that was supposed to be a contest between Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and his onetime colleague, Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki. Walesa needed more than 50% of the vote to avoid a runoff. He won just under 40%, with 23% going...
Both Walesa and Tyminski promised to make things better but never specified how they would accomplish that goal. Walesa called vaguely for "acceleration" of the transition toward free markets, decontrolled prices and private property. To that end, he vowed to be "a President with an ax," one who would force change through the Polish legislature and even rule by decree if necessary. But when he talked specifics, he tended to offer pierogi- in-the-sky proposals like his short-lived promise to give every worker 100 million zlotys, about $10,000, in government bonds...
Faced with this battle between two former friends, many voters saw in Tyminski, 42, a new face and a successful businessman who seemed to embody their hopes for prosperity. NEITHER ONE NOR THE OTHER, read Tyminski's campaign posters. "People didn't vote for a Western millionaire," says Piotr Aleksandrowicz, deputy chief editor of the Warsaw daily Rzeczpospolita. "They voted against the Establishment and for their own dreams." But it was Tyminski who got their votes, running especially well among younger and rural voters and in areas like the coal-mining city of Katowice, hit hard by the government...