Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.comment From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Slowing down in Lithuania Date: Sat, 21 Nov 92 17:35:41 EST Message-ID: \SE C;COMMENTARY \SS (WS) \HD Slowing down in Lithuania \BY Claudia Winkler Valiant Lithuania, first of all the members of the Soviet Union to declare its independence in March 1990, voted the former communists back to power this week. Poignant as it is, this turn of events should not be confused with wholesale retrogression. Instead, think of it in ordinary democratic terms: The incumbent party presides over dizzying declines in economic output, with no end in sight; fuel is short as winter closes in - kindergartens and hospitals set their thermostats at 50 degrees; and the president, a prickly music scholar who surrounds himself with bodyguards, blames every difficulty on Russian spies and inadequate help from the West. It wouldn't take James Carville to discern an electorate primed to vote for change. That they did. The Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party appears to have won 79 out of 141 parliamentary seats, enough to form a majority government. Sajudis, the nationalist organization led by President Vytautas Landsbergis, is reduced to a mere 25 seats. So much for the president's plan to end political gridlock by disbanding parliament three years early and holding new elections to secure a sympathetic legislature. Even hardship and clumsy incumbents, however, would not have sent the voters into the arms of the LDLP if it had called for return to the status quo ante. Instead, the former communists espouse Lithuanian independence, the withdrawal of all Russian troops, democratic freedoms and a continuing, though slower, transition to a market economy. No one knows to what extent that last commitment is sincere and informed, but the signs are discouraging. The party's leader, longtime central planner and former Lithuanian Communist Party boss Algirdas Brazauskas, campaigned on the need for government to respond to people's pain - by restoring state subsidies to money-losing businesses to protect people's jobs. A key variable affecting how Mr. Brazauskas will govern is whether Boris Yeltsin's pro-democratic, pro-market regime hangs on in Moscow. Sajudis limps out of this debacle badly splintered. Sooner or later, around its remnants or around some new nucleus, an opposition party must form, offering alternative prescriptions for government. Even in rocky post-communist soil, that is how democracy works - so long as the indispensable freedoms of speech and association endure. Claudia Winkler is chief editorial writer for Scripps Howard Newspapers. This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM