Lech Wałęsa

Lech Wałęsa (born September 29, 1943, Popowo, near Włocławek, Poland) is a labour activist who helped form and led (1980–90) communist Poland’s first independent trade union, Solidarity. The charismatic leader of millions of Polish workers, he went on to become the president of Poland (1990–95). He received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1983.

Wałęsa, the son of a carpenter, received only primary and vocational education and in 1967 began work as an electrician at the huge Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. He witnessed the 1970 food riots in Gdańsk in which police killed a number of demonstrators. When new protests against Poland’s communist government erupted in 1976, Wałęsa emerged as an antigovernment union activist and lost his job as a result. On August 14, 1980, during protests at the Lenin Shipyard caused by an increase in food prices, Wałęsa climbed over the shipyard fence and joined the workers inside, who elected him head of a strike committee to negotiate with management. Three days later the strikers’ demands were conceded, but when strikers in other Gdańsk enterprises asked Wałęsa to continue his strike out of solidarity, he immediately agreed. Wałęsa took charge of an Interfactory Strike Committee that united the enterprises of the Gdańsk-Sopot-Gdynia area. This committee issued a set of bold political demands, including the right to strike and form free trade unions, and it proclaimed a general strike. Fearing a national revolt, the communist authorities yielded to the workers’ principal demands, and on August 31 Wałęsa and Mieczysław Jagielski, Poland’s first deputy premier, signed an agreement conceding to the workers the right to organize freely and independently.

When some 10 million Polish workers and farmers joined semiautonomous unions in response to this momentous agreement, the Interfactory Strike Committee was transformed into a national federation of unions under the name Solidarity (Solidarność), with Wałęsa as its chairman and chief spokesman. Solidarity was officially recognized by the Polish government in October, and Wałęsa steered the federation on a course of carefully limited confrontations with the government in order to avert the possibility of Soviet military intervention in Poland.

The federation’s gains proved ephemeral, however: on December 13, 1981, the Polish government imposed martial law, Solidarity was outlawed, and most of the leaders of Solidarity were arrested, including Wałęsa, who was detained for nearly a year. The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Peace to Wałęsa in 1983 was criticized by the Polish government. Fearing involuntary exile, he remained in Poland while his wife, Danuta, traveled to Oslo, Norway, to accept the prize on his behalf.

As the leader of the now underground Solidarity movement, Wałęsa was subjected to constant harassment until collapsing economic conditions and a new wave of labour unrest in 1988 forced Poland’s government to negotiate with him and other Solidarity leaders. Those negotiations led to an agreement that restored Solidarity to legal status and sanctioned free elections for a limited number of seats in the newly restored upper house of the parliament. Solidarity won an overwhelming majority of those seats in June 1989, and, after Wałęsa refused to form a coalition government with the communists, the parliament was forced to accept a Solidarity-led government, though Wałęsa himself refused to serve as premier.

Wałęsa helped his Solidarity colleague Tadeusz Mazowiecki become premier of this government in 1989, but he ran against Mazowiecki for president in 1990 and won Poland’s first direct presidential election by a landslide. As president, Wałęsa helped guide Poland through its first free parliamentary elections (1991) and watched as successive ministries converted Poland’s state-run economy into a free-market system. Wałęsa had displayed remarkable political skills as the leader of Solidarity, but his plain speech, his confrontational style, and his refusal to approve a relaxation of Poland’s strict new prohibitions on abortion eroded his popularity late in his term as president. In 1995 he sought reelection but was narrowly defeated by the former communist Aleksander Kwasniewski, head of the Democratic Left Alliance. Wałęsa ran for president once again in 2000 but carried only a tiny fraction of the vote.

In the wake of that defeat, Wałęsa announced that he was leaving politics. Subsequently he devoted much of his time to the affairs of the Lech Wałęsa Institute, which he had founded in 1995 to spread the word of Solidarity’s achievements, promote democracy, and build civil society in Poland and the world. In August 2006 Wałęsa announced that he had quit Solidarity at the beginning of that year in opposition to the union’s support of the ruling right-wing Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość; PiS) and Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński, twin brothers who had once been prominent in Solidarity and who were serving as the country’s president and prime minister, respectively. “This is no longer my union. This is a different era, different people, different problems,” Wałęsa said in explaining his departure. In particular he opposed the Kaczyńskis’ focus on rooting out those who had been involved in communist rule and PiS’s attempt to make public all files of the communist-era secret police.

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For decades there were accusations that Wałęsa had served as an informant for the communist security services in the 1970s, despite his vehement denials and the ruling of a special court in 2000 that cleared him of the allegations of collaboration. Nevertheless, the furor around those allegations swelled again in 2008 with the publication of a lengthy book that purported to prove that Wałęsa, using the code name Bolek, had been an operative for the security services from 1970 to 1976. The issue resurfaced in February 2016, when the Institute of National Remembrance—an agency constituted to investigate the Nazi and communist eras in Poland—seized materials from the widow of a former minister of the interior that were claimed to document Wałęsa’s role as a spy for the security services.