Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 10, 1990 TAG: 9004100565
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Greece: Southern European, peninsular, member of NATO.
Slovenia: part of traditionally non-aligned, but communist, Yugoslavia.
Hungary: Eastern European, member of the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact.
Different places, different characteristics. But in all four, democracy has been a sometime thing - and in all four, free elections were held on Sunday.
Hungary had not seen free elections since the late 1940s, just before communists consolidated power and made the nation a Soviet satellite. In 1956, a popular uprising was bloodily quelled when Moscow sent troops and tanks into the country and retook Budapest.
Yet the Hungarian revolution of 1989-1990 has been gentle. Free elections were called less because of popular unrest than because, with Mikhail Gorbachev signaling it was all right by him, free elections seemed the natural thing to do.
The way had been paved by Communist Party reformers - not that being even a reform-minded Communist sat well Sunday with the electorate. With only eight of the 261 seats in the new parliament, according to preliminary counts, the reform Communists (redubbed Socialists) are almost out of the game. Instead, the major players will be the conservative Hungarian Democratic Forum, which apparently won enough seats to lead a governing coalition, the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats and the agrarian Smallholders Party.
In Slovenia, the free elections were the first since World War II. But while there now will be a multiparty parliament, the head of the reformist Communists (now called the Party for Democratic Renewal) led the balloting for president. His runoff opponent favors immediate secession from Yugoslavia.
Greece and Peru have known uninterrupted democracy for longer: Greece since the military yielded power in 1974, Peru since the military yielded power in 1980. Both, however, are troubled nations.
In Greece, the hope in the third election in 10 months was that somebody would be given a clear mandate to rule, and to forge a program for easing the country's economic problems. But as of Monday, it was not clear whether either the conservative New Democracy or the Socialists of former Premier Andreas Papandreou - who faces fraud and wiretapping charges - had won such a mandate.
In Peru, the voters clearly rejected the governing leftist party, Aprista, under which the inflation rate had become astronomical. But novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, running on a free-market platform, apparently will face independent Alberto Fujimori in a runoff.
A novelist as president? A son of Japanese immigrants leading a Latin American nation? Either notion has charm. But more to the point will be how well the man ultimately elected can ease the inflation crisis, and how well he can blunt the assaults of the ruthless Shining Path guerrillas.
Clearly, free elections do not solve all ills. But while democracy may not be a very good form of government, to paraphrase the cliche, all other forms are worse.
Would Hungarians be better off under communist rule? Slovenians under an unelected Tito? Greeks under the colonels? Peruvians under the Shining Path? To ask such questions is to answer them.
by CNB