glue, milk for butter and politicians.
By a striking coincidence, two of Lithuanians top political figures, archrivals of the left and right, are facing off here in their home town Sunday in a district race that will say much about election results nationwide.
Sunday's election, Lithuania's first since it became an independent nation, will fill the country's new 141-seat parliament, called Siemas. The nation will also hold a "yes" or "no" referendum on the new constitution which would create the post of president.
The contest is wide open, with 40 percent of the electorate undecided when the last poll was taken nearly a month ago. All polls are banned within one month of the election. A German balloting system is expected to provide results Sunday night.
"Anything can happen", said Andrius Kubilius, executive secretary of the Sajudis movement which has been leading Lithuania since independence in Aug. 1991. "People just have not made up their minds".
In Kashadorys, one of 71 districts nationwide, the reform-minded former Prime Minister Gediminas Vagnorius is squared off against the man who sacked him:
Algirdas Brazauskas, the former Communist Party chief for Lithuania. Month-old polls showed 15 percent for Vagnorius and 13 percent for Brazauskas, with the rest undecided or split between five other candidates. But since then a serious energy crisis has struck Lithuania, and this could work against the country's present leadership.
At stake in the battle for the new parliament is whether the pace of privatization and land reform will slow, as well as the country's awkward relationship with Russia.
The left, led by the charismatic Brazauskas, wants slower economic reform and a less confrontational relationship with Moscow. The right, led by Vytautas Landsbergis and the Sajudis movement, wants to continue rapid reform and to build stronger links with the West.
Both Vagnorius and Brazauskas will almost certainly be elected thanks to a voting system that apportions 70 of the 141 seats to political parties in a proportional voting scheme.
But the race here in tiny Kashadorys is a key barometer not only of left versus right, but also because it is taking place in the countryside where disenchantment with corruption in land reform is creating a backlash against Landsbergis, the music professor who guided Lithuania to independence.
"We moved too fast", said Vitautas Streikauskas, head of the regional administration for Kashadorys. "Now there is a lot of discontentment. I think Brazauskas is making sense to people. I think he will win".
Streikauskas, like nearly everyone
in Kashadorys, sat in his unheated office in a coat with a scarf around his neck. His breath was visible as he spoke.
He noted that the land program which returns ancestral land to whoever can prove it was his before Sovie occupation, has been particularly ripe with corruption.
"Officials are appropriating tractors, equipment and the best land to themselves", said a senior Western diplomat in Vilnius. "It's creating a lot of bad feelings".
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