Halfway House

Luxuriating in one of the little freedoms that distinguish Gomulka's Poland from other Communist countries, some 15.5 million Poles last week pondered voting lists with real choices, walked into polling stations that afforded real privacy, marked ballots with decision. The elections were for local councils across the nation, and admittedly the lists favored candidates of the regime-dominated National Front; voters who chose not to mark their ballots voted automatically for the National Front's men whose names appeared at the top on all lists. Still the right to scratch a name existed.

Only one major question was involved: Did the Gomulka government still command enough respect to bring voters out in large numbers for a national election? A year ago an impressive 94% of eligible voters turned out for the parliamentary elections to give Gomulka a solid vote of confidence. In the face of growing public disenchantment with the Communist leader, the regime nervously decided on a fair test. There were no vast Communist demonstrations; not a Communist flag, not even a picture of Lenin or Gomulka, was to be seen as the polls opened on the bright winter Sunday morning.

As usual, vodka sales were banned on election day and, dressed in Sunday best, most voters went straight from Mass to the apartment houses, factories, country shops or town halls where dignified local polling officials kept potbellied stoves stoked against the biting cold. Parents came to vote with small children wrapped in sheepskin kozuchy. Nuns with stiff white headpieces stood in lines with mustachioed peasants and smartly uniformed army officers. One elderly woman arrived to vote with a goose on a leash.

The results showed that more than 86% of Poland's eligible voters had participated, and of those who did, 97% deferred to the top-seeded National Front candidates. The vote was less a vote of confidence in Gomulka's future than a recognition that however drafty his halfway house to independence, the past had been worse.

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