Word: walesa
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...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...
...Walesa behaved rudely toward his opponent, refusing to shake his hand during television debates and referring repeatedly to his service as Minister of Youth Affairs under the communist regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski. "He is a man identified with a gang of thugs," Walesa growled. In a society that values courtly manners, the old electrician's style grated. "He did not realize that democratic power means persuading people," says Geremek...
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...
POLES OUST WALESA...
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...