Poland A Stranger Calls

By Richard Lacayo

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 won't say how. For good measure, he has said Poland should acquire nuclear weapons, the sooner the better.

In their 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 to Tyminski and 18% to Mazowiecki. Now the still mysterious Tyminski will face Walesa alone on Dec. 9.

That has sent Walesa hurrying to mend fences with Mazowiecki, who resigned as Prime Minister one day after his humiliating third-place finish. Mazowiecki fell victim to voter despair over the nation's economic chaos. Poland is undergoing the most radical conversion to private enterprise of any East European country. But Poles are furious over the attendant disruptions, including a 200% annual inflation rate and an increase in unemployment from almost nothing to more than 1 million of the nation's 18 million workers. In their frustration, many sought scapegoats for their plight: former Communists, Jews and even the leaders of Solidarity who wrenched Poland away from communism.

As head of the Solidarity-led government that came to power 15 months ago, Mazowiecki automatically became a prime target. Voters contending with a 30% decrease in purchasing power charged him with prolonging the pain by moving too cautiously to sell off government-owned businesses and property. Many also resented his reluctance to bring to trial Poland's old Communist bosses, some of whom secured control of government property before it could be privatized. It did not help that he ran on the sobering platform that there was more pain to come.

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.

Walesa also played on the anti-Semitism that popped up repeatedly in the campaign. Though Poland's Jewish community numbers about 5,000, accusations that Jews are behind the nation's travails are common. When Walesa supporters complained that Jews in high places were hiding their ancestry, he made a winking reply about the need for "clarity." Mazowiecki was one of those rumored to be part Jewish. In one of the campaign's most dismal moments, the bishop of Mazowiecki's hometown of Plock felt called upon to affirm the Prime Minister's Catholic ancestry all the way back to the 15th century.

After Solidarity candidates swept last year's parliamentary elections, it was Walesa who chose Mazowiecki, then a close adviser, to serve as Prime Minister. Walesa expected to be a power behind the throne, but Mazowiecki kept his old colleague at arm's length. Walesa brought his resentment onto the campaign trail, complaining at one rally that though he had a special phone line installed at his Gdansk headquarters to connect him with Mazowiecki's office, "it never rang." With his hearty manner and working-class accent, Walesa derided Mazowiecki as an intellectual out of touch with ordinary Poles.

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's austerity plan.

Yet Poles knew almost nothing about him. Only now is a more detailed profile emerging -- and its shape is strange and sometimes contradictory. Tyminski slipped out of Poland in 1969, apparently on a tourist visa, and eventually reached Canada, where he studied computer science. In 1975 he founded his own company, Transduction Ltd., which makes computer systems for factories and ^ power plants. Traveling to Peru in 1982, he stayed on for six years, eventually starting a cable TV company. There he met his wife Graciela and also apparently underwent a kind of spiritual transformation among the Peruvian Indians.

By last week, however, details surfaced that contradicted some of Tyminski's accounts. He initially claimed that after leaving Poland, he did not return until last year. But the pro-Solidarity paper Gazeta Wyborcza cited government records that showed he visited the country seven times between 1980 and 1989 -- with the visa for each trip obtained from the Polish embassy in Tripoli, Libya. Tyminski called the reports "a lie, a lie and a lie."

Tyminski's showing has piqued interest in his book, Sacred Dogs, a truculent 260-page call to arms that he published at his own expense last summer. Oddly, the fervently pro-business book is dedicated to Roman Samsel, the former Latin American correspondent for Trybuna Ludu, the Polish Communist Party newspaper. Samsel remains a key figure in Tyminski's campaign. "That kind of association ought to raise a lot of eyebrows in Poland," says a Western diplomat. At the least, it has fed unsubstantiated rumors that Tyminski had links to the former Communist government's secret service. No less disturbingly, the book devotes an entire chapter to Tyminski's call for Poland to arm itself with 100 medium- range nuclear missiles "so that we can work in peace and feel ourselves fully independent and equal to other free countries."

Walesa is still the favorite in next week's vote, but a victory could turn out to be a mixed blessing for him and for Poland. "Walesa can't produce an economic miracle, and that's exactly what the people expect," says Stanislaw Stomma, a member of the Polish Senate. "Tadeusz got used up, and now it's Walesa's turn." Some fear that the difficulty of delivering on people's hopes for economic revival will eventually prompt Walesa to abuse the undefined presidential powers in the new constitution, which is still being drafted. During the campaign Walesa hinted he would rule by decree if necessary. For one of his campaign posters he used a photograph of himself closely modeled after a famous picture of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the hero who expelled the Soviet army from Poland in 1920 and became dictator after a coup d'etat in 1926.

The fear that Walesa might play the strongman led many of his old Solidarity comrades to turn against him. Even as they close ranks behind him to head off % a Tyminski victory, some are still wary. "Of all the postcommunist countries, Poland alone had a broad democratic movement like Solidarity, which we hoped would prepare us for any setbacks," says Bronislaw Geremek, once a close adviser to Walesa who later allied himself with Mazowiecki. "This election proves that Poland, like all the others, must confront the authoritarian temptation." Next week it must also confront the temptation to cast its fate with a mysterious stranger, one who turned up suddenly to offer a dubious promise of salvation.

With reporting by James L. Graff/Warsaw, with other bureaus