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The presidential election that takes place in Poland today once would have seemed like the crowning moment in the decades of Eastern Europe's struggle for democracy.
Instead, for many Poles the campaign for the first popularly elected president in Polish history has turned into a frightening display of Poland at its most vulnerable.
It's the runoff that was not supposed to happen: a choice between Lech Walesa, Nobel Prize-winning leader of the Solidarity labor movement that fought communism to its knees, and Stanislaw Tyminski, a previously unknown emigre businessman who spent the past 21 years making money in Canada and Peru, and who claims he underwent a 'spiritual transformation' in the Amazon jungle.
Though the polls put Walesa far ahead, Tyminski has become the symbol of a new political force capable of exploiting the bitter split within Solidarity.
But startling facts about Tyminski began to emerge only days before the first round of voting Nov. 25, when the dark horse candidate surged in the polls.
Born on Jan. 27, 1948, in the Warsaw suburb of Prsuzkow, he grew up in Komorow, one of the small towns that ring the capital. At age 17 he was severely stabbed in a fight with three other young men; details about this incident seem to have faded with the passage of time.
The Polish army classified him 'Category D,' unfit for service, in 1968, and a year later, Tyminski broke off his studies at a technical university and received permission to leave Poland for Sweden, where he worked on a flower farm for seven months.
He has said he was exempted from his military obligations because he was the...