Word: walesa
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...could not locate in the text a single word about the most famous electrician in history, Nobel Prize winner Lech Walesa, and his role in dismantling the Soviet empire, or about the first noncommunist Prime Minister in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, Tadeusz Mazowiecki. It all started here - in Poland. That is what I am teaching my kids, and that is what I expected to find in my favorite weekly. Christopher Komornicki, Wojtowice, Poland...
...leading voter polls? Because democracy raises expectations that the PAN and PRD have yet to meet. Calderon's predecessor, Vicente Fox, was the Lech Walesa of Mexico, a democratic hero who turned out to be a mediocre President. Calderon has pushed through some much needed economic changes like tax reform; but the drug war, which has produced more than 7,000 murders since the start of last year, has consumed much of his agenda. Almost half the population still lives in poverty, and that won't improve any time soon thanks to the U.S. economic calamity across the border. Meanwhile...
Then again, that's democracy, hombre. If Mexican voters were right to oust the PRI nine years ago, who's to say they're wrong if they resuscitate the party this summer? We've seen this phenomenon before - like Walesa's Poland, where democracy's early disappointments brought former communists back to power in the 1990s. But democracy survived there, and the communist-era holdovers were forced to govern more from the center. They were defeated in the 2005 presidential election, and today the country has a center-right President, much like Calderon...
...decade, however, the situation had become all but untenable for the autocratic government in Warsaw. As complete economic chaos threatened to overwhelm Poland, the Jaruzelski clique was forced to moderate its views toward Solidarity. In September 1988, Minister of Interior Czeslaw Kiszczak had approached Walesa and made the unprecedented move of inviting Solidarity to political talks intended to fix the country’s worsening political and economic situation...
...Walesa, Solidarity emerged from the overthrow of Communism popularly viewed as the savior of the Polish nation but proved to be much less effective as a governing party. Just four years after the Round Table talks, the once-dominant coalition led by Solidarity had fragmented and lost power to its Social Democratic opposition, some of whom had served in the Communist government. This was not due simply to the economic climate; in the first truly free elections, the movement split violently when Walesa ran for president against Tadeusz Mazowiecki, another Solidarity politician who was then prime minister...