Victory for Gomulka

In Communist Poland, where eligible voters are frowned on for not voting, some 17,650,000 voters out of a possible 18,615,185 showed up at the polls last week and voted overwhelmingly for Comrade Wladyslaw Gomulka's Communist followers. Gomulka himself, who still lives on the reputation of having stood up to Khrushchev in 1956's October, gathered a record 99.54% of the votes in his Warsaw district.

One reason for his smashing victory was that the powerful Roman Catholic Church, although currently feuding with the Gomulka regime, chose not to proclaim its opposition to the Gomulka slate, allowing Catholic voters to vote as they pleased within the narrow choices offered them. Though no real opposition party is allowed, voters are permitted to pick from a slate of state-approved candidates, most of whom must be Communist. In Cracow, a Catholic candidate won more votes than Communist Premier Josef Cyrankiewicz, who was on the same list, and in Wroclaw, a Catholic got more support than Gomulka's Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki.

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