ABSTRACT
With the centre organization having gained 83 per cent of the seats in the Assembly, I think it is safe to say that the regime could have produced a legislature of approximately the same composition at any point in time that it chose. In fact, it may be that the previous Assembly had almost as much opposition. It seemed that one could regularly muster twenty or thirty votes to call for a debate which the leadership wanted to avoid. While the regime could have produced the Assembly in any way it had wanted to, it had actually been created in a long, contentious political debate and a heated, violent election campaign. The regime had affirmed its commitment to a certain degree of liberalization and, having gone through the effort, it wanted to reap the rewards. Pointing to the debate and the campaign, it declared the political experiment a success and expected to have things its own way.
