The result of the second round of the presidential elections witnesses the defeat of this initiative.
Confronted by an inconsistent candidate, whose sole merit was that of serving as an expression of social discontent, the leader-symbol of Solidarnosc only received the support of 39.65% of those eligible to vote! In this first free nationwide election 47% of the electors took refuge in abstention whereas more than
13% of eligible voters chose to support the eccentric Tyminski. The victory of
Walesa, obtained in such conditions, is indicative of disorders to come. And his goal — to gain the people's acceptance of the suffering necessary for the reestablishment of capitalism by participation and social manipulation — is not yet won.
It is among the youth and the workers that Walesa's challenger obtained the highest percentages of the vote — 30% of voters under 25 and 26% of workers taking part in the vote declared their support growing discontent in the working class.
The parties of the opposition, in crisis, are incapable of offering an alternative solution. The serious problems they are meeting will very likely lead to new splits and ruptures.
More than ever, there is an imperative necessity for a new left movement, which can attract all those who no longer have illusions in PASOK or Synaspismos. * llow victory for Tyminski. The later obtained his best scores in Higher Silesia, the industrial heart of Poland and in the rural regions of Greater Poland. At Elblag, city of the first important investments of foreign capital (the Swiss-Swedish holding ABB has recently taken over the Zamech enterprise there, one of the most important of the city) Tyminski received 35.7% of the votes. These figures reflect the disarray which is particularly strong among the young workers.
The zealous application of the recipes of the International Monetary Fund has led to a lowering of 30% in industrial production, a reduction of the real average wage of the order of 35%, and a vertiginous rise in unemployment, which has already passed — before the big waves of dismissals linked to privatization - the threshold of a million. The social deficit which had overshadowed Mazowiecki in the first round of the presidential election has not spared Walesa.
The latter has suffered also from the democratic deficit. In voting for the candidates of Solidarnosc in the June 1989 elections, the electors had pronounced themselves for democracy. They could then have only a single reference to this hope - that of the democracy which reigned inside Solidarnosc in 1980-81. A democracy from below, with election and recall of representatives, organized around workplace collectives capable of influencing the decisions taken at the summit. A decentralized democracy, where each link — in the workplace as in the region — was sovereign and could reject the decision of the superior echelon if it went against its interests.
This memory, at the same time blurred and idealized during the decade of the state of emergency, was the sole experience of democracy on a mass scale that the great majority of the population knew.
Far from corresponding to this ideal, the parliamentary democracy installed in
Poland has been that of the absence of alternatives, justified in a language mixing pseudo-scientific argumentation and an authoritarian morality, all the more 25 authoritarian when its actors felt them-
POLAND / AROUND THE WORLD selves invested with a historic mission.
Paradoxically, the election of Lech Walesa thus bears witness to a growing rejection of the theme he has made his own - that of the return to capitalism. For all that, in this election none of his opponents have presented an alternative to this choice. Not even the ex-apparatchik Stalinist student Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, whose programme stipulated "an indispensable privatization of a large part of productive capital". Social discontent, of which the strikes in the mines and in urban transport on the eve of the first round were the expression, has thus not been able to
AROUND THE WORLD CHAD Coup d'etat ONCE again, Chad has returned to the find an electoral expression. It is a time bomb that the new President must dismantle and which could weigh on the struggle for his succession opened inside Solidarnosc.
The immediate stake will be to preserve the internal democracy of the Polish trade union, put in danger after the attempts of its national leadership to muzzle the leaderships of the combative branches (miners and urban transport workers) on November 20, as well as the national agreement of the workplace commissions (the "Network") on November 7. * Sudan...the regime in Ndjamena suddenly ceased to be "democratic" and "legitimate"
•
But the cynicism does not stop there.
ment.
Finally, all the independent trade unions — in electricity, health, national education, higher education, posts and telecoms - have gone into action. These are unions that have broken in the course of the years with the official regime-controlled trade union.
They have now decided on a wave of general strikes: the first on December 1415, the second between December 18 and 22, and then an indefinite all-out strike starting on January 9.
Their aim is to beat back the government and win a reduction in taxes, the price of basic necessities and of some other products.
Notice of the strike was given before the municipal elections, at which time the government made its first concessions, the suppression of an extra tax which involved taking 5% off income.
A social conflict of the highest importance is developing in Senegal. The coordination of opposition parties has decided to actively support the strike. The idea of a political mass strike is gaining support; appeals are being made to shopkeepers and transport workers to help bring the country to a standstill. The corrupt and enfeebled Abu Diouf regime (a member of the Socialist International) is sinking headlines. Idriss Deby, former commander in chief of the army of Hissan Habré, has just overthrown the latter after a lightning war launched from the frontier zones in the east of the country. In the course of a few weeks the capital Ndjamena has fallen — troops loyal to Habré were incapable of resisting and Habré himself precipitately left the country.
In 1986 France and the United States intervened to defend the Habré regime against a coalition between certain Chadian groups and Libya. The stabilization of the situation, after the deployment of the imperialist forces had permitted the defeat of the Libyans, was then hailed as the victory of a certain national legitimacy in the face of totalitarian threats. However, the French forces based in Chad were ordered not to intervene this time, and the so-called democratic regime of Habré has collapsed like a house of cards.
Why has the French government allowed the collapse of a regime as "legitimate", ', in its eyes, as that of Habré? How has Paris been able to explain that, having waged as costly a war as that of 1985-86 to defend its Chadian ally of the moment, nothing has been done to support him this time?
The Chadian state is an abstract construct and imperialism accords it a legitimacy when it needs to do so. Because Paris has an account to settle with Washington in this region, because it seeks a 26 new relationship with Libya, because it is preparing for a possible crisis in
The victory of the Deby group has led to the discovery that nearly 700 Libyan prisoners had been trained by the Americans, under the protection of Habré, to launch terrorist actions in Libya. After the fall of the capital, a lightning operation allowed an American plane (registered with NATO forces) to land at Ndjamena and to take a group of these Libyans away to an unknown destination. The White House, usually so prompt to denounce international terrorism, has for the moment made no comment. * SENEGAL Rising tension THE call for a boycott of the recent municipal and rural elections from all the opposition forces in Senegal was largely heeded. The consensus among the opposition is that there was a turnout of about 15%. Even so, the government has not hesitated to make extravagant assertions about the turnout, claiming 75% in Dakar and 90% in some places.
Since then, tension has mounted. At the start of December, the schools were on strike and school students' protests were systematically broken up with tear gas, as is the custom. Students have been holding regular general assemblies in order to launch a similar movedeeper into crisis. * deener into crisis.
JAPAN:
Trotsky symposium ment); A. M. Podschekoldin (CPSU Institute of Marxism-Leninism); and E. Kotelenets (P. Lumumba University). Other guest participants were B. Kagarlitsky (USSR); P. Broué (France); Bala Tampoe (Sri Lanka); E. Volkov (Trotsky's grandson - Mexico).
About 200 people attended the discussions on November 2 and 3, and over 400 came to hear speeches by Volkov, Broué,