Poland: A Flowering of Democracy

It's one man−one vote as the party congress meets to chart the future

The extraordinary gathering was dominated by new faces, new ideas and new expectations. The members came from all over Poland: brawny shipyard workers from Gdansk, deeply tanned farmers from Poznan, professors from Cracow. Their average age was only 40. They had been chosen by secret ballots in elections at their local party units; 91% had never before taken part in such a referendum. But when the 1,955 delegates converged last week on Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science, a towering...

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