The 1980s had opened with Poland's striking workers at Lenin shipyard hoisting an unknown electrician named Lech Walesa over the plant fence. The decade closed in December 1989 with the snow-covered corpses of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, Romania's monstrous first couple, victims of a violent revolution--part palace coup, part spontaneous popular uprising--against a regime that had become a grotesque caricature of Stalinism.

       Today, President Walesa is an increasingly unpopular head of state. On September 19, Poland democratically elected a 460-seat Sejm (Parliament's lower house) dominated by the "nevi" communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) and the Polish Peasant Party (PSL), a former Communist Party satellite. Together, these parties hold nearly two-thirds of the seats.

       Solidarity, which initiated the vote of no-confidence that brought down the centrist, proreform Democratic Union government of Prime Minister Hanna Suchocka in May, was shut out of the Sejm but managed to capture 7 seats in the 100-member Senate. Walesa's moderate Non-Party Bloc to Support Reform barely cleared the 5 percent hurdle, capturing just 20 seats.

       Today, Romania is ruled by a minority government led by the Party of Social Democracy of Romania (PSDR), the renamed Democratic National Salvation Front of President Ion Iliescu. A former Stalinist, he has essentially run the country since Ceausescu's overthrow.

       Though widely anticipated, Poland's turn to the left at a time when so-called shock-therapy reforms have given it the fastest growing economy in Europe raises several troubling questions: Will the new government of 34-year-old Prime Minister Waldemar Pawlak, of the PSL, roll back key market programs?

       What of ambitious plans to privatize money-losing state enterprises that are vital for continued progress? Does the election signal a popular nostalgia for paternalistic centralism that eliminated class and income disparities through a bogus egalitarianism based on shared hardships?