World

Poles Re-elect President

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

October 9, 2000 / 2:05 PM EDT / CBS

Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski easily won re-election to a new five-year term in an election that proved his popularity as a champion of average Poles struggling with the painful shift from communism to a market economy.

Partial official returns from Sunday's election showed Kwasniewski winning 55 percent of the vote in the country's third popular presidential election since communist rule ended in 1989.

None of the 11 hopefuls, including legendary Solidarity founder Lech Walesa, mustered even one-third as many votes. About 62 percent of 29 million eligible voters cast ballots, a higher than expected turnout.

In conceding defeat, Marian Krzaklewski, who heads a bloc of right-wing parties that runs a minority government in Poland, said the vote was a warning that Solidarity must regroup for parliamentary elections due by next fall.

The Polish presidency is largely ceremonial, but carries legislative veto power and moral authority that the 46-year-old, media-savvy president has used well to bolster his popularity.

A former communist-era sports minister, Kwasniewski is credited with transforming his communist colleagues into western-style Social Democrats who won parliamentary elections in 1994.

But Solidarity showed its resilience by taking back the parliament in 1997. Now the stage is set for another tough fight.

Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Kwasniewski on his re-election and promised to visit. Relations between Moscow and Warsaw, strained after the 1989 ouster of communists in Poland, worsened when Poland joined the NATO Western military alliance last March.

Kwasniewski had maintained a commanding lead in opinion polls, despite Solidarity attack ads that included video of him and an aide appearing to mock Polish-born Pope John Paul II in 1997. Poland is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, and Kwasniewski is an atheist.

Though Poland has recorded solid annual growth and improved living standards, many average Poles have felt left behind by the country's so-called shock therapy economic reforms. Unemployment has soared to nearly 14 percent.

Kwasniewski said winning European Union membership for Poland would be his main goal during his second five-year term in office.

"European Union accession is the main and the most difficult task. Poles must prepare themselves for the European Union to be able for meet this challenge," Kwasniewski said.