The results came the morning after. The opposition’s defeat was crushing. The Communists, the future Socialist Party, emerged triumphant, with more than sixty per cent of the vote. My mother declared that the elections had been neither free nor fair. The entire campaign, she said, had been organized by the Party. It was absurd to expect it to both regulate a competition between itself and other parties and try to win the election at the same time. The whole thing was a fraud. That turned out to be harsh, or at least harsh by the standards of the tourists who had in the meantime descended on
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