Walesa Rally Forces Runoff For Second Term As President Solidarity Leader Sounds Fears Of Communists Regaining Power

Fighting for a second term as president, Lech Walesa staged a remarkable comeback in the first round of the election on Sunday, gaining enough votes to face a former Communist in a runoff, surveys of voters leaving the polls showed.

Walesa, who trailed so badly several months ago that many Poles were writing his political obituary, was just behind Aleksander Kwasniewski, the surveys indicated. The Polish state television reported Kwasniewski with 34 percent of the vote and Walesa with 33.2 percent.

Because neither candidate received more than 50 percent, a runoff will be held on Nov. 19.

Many analysts predict that Walesa will emerge triumphant in two weeks and win a second five-year term. They say voters who backed unsuccessful centrist candidates on Sunday are likely to coalesce behind the former Solidarity leader to prevent a former Communist from winning.

The next two weeks of campaigning will match one of the world’s best-known anti-communists against Kwasniewski, who has remodeled himself as a modern, market-oriented politician.

Analysts suggest that Walesa will finally outstrip Kwasniewski by playing on fears that the old guard would have too much power with a former Communist as president joining Prime Minister Jozef Oleksy, also a former Communist.

At a polling station in an elementary school in the working-class Warsaw suburb of Wola, Robert Gawelkiewicz, 30, gave a sense of this worry. “It is a choice of a lesser evil,” he said after voting for Walesa. “It is not a choice between persons, but between certain systems, sets of values, and political groups.”

While opinion polls in the last several weeks showed that younger voters preferred Kwansniewski, who is 40, they, too, seemed to go for Walesa in surprising numbers on Sunday.

“Thanks to him, we are free,” said Jacek Mosakowski, 26. “It is thanks to him we have passports and everyone can say what he believes.”

Walesa made an astonishing comeback in the last month, rescuing what seemed like an impossible position behind many other candidates. The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who, as head of the independent trade union movement Solidarity led the charge against Poland’s Communists in the 1980s, became increasingly unpopular as president.

Many Poles found his rough speech from his days as a worker at the Gdansk shipyards unseemly for a head of state. Recently, he proclaimed: “I am a conceited buffoon. This is just how I was made.”

His frequent involvement in the minutiae of Polish politics was also seen as inappropriate for the president of a country hoping to join Western institutions, particularly the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

But later Walesa changed course, becoming more statesmanlike.