Lech Wałęsa

I

Introduction

Lech Wałęsa, born in 1943, Polish labor union activist, Nobel laureate, and president of Poland (1990-1995). Wałęsa rose to international fame in August 1980 as the leader of the independent trade union Solidarity (Solidarność), which played a decisive role in bringing down Communism not only in Poland but throughout Eastern and Central Europe.

II

Trade Union Activist

Wałęsa was one of eight children born into a Catholic worker-peasant family in Popowa, a village between Warsaw, the capital of Poland, and Gdańsk, on the Baltic coast. He received a primary education, trained as an electrician in a local agricultural-machinery college, and began work in 1961. In 1967 he left home to find work as an electrician at the huge state-owned Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk.

In December 1970 Wałęsa participated in protests that erupted along the Baltic seaboard after the Polish government imposed drastic increases in food prices. The Communist Party leadership violently quelled the disturbances, and in 1976 the government again announced that it was raising basic food prices. After workers went on strike to protest the increase, the government backed down from its plan. Wałęsa’s criticisms of the party hierarchy cost him his job at the shipyard in 1976.

Wałęsa spent the next four years working intermittently, repairing electrical machinery in other state firms. As the Polish economy lurched into a new crisis in the late 1970s, fueled by Poland’s fast-growing international debt, the government responded with wage controls and price increases. The Lenin Shipyard was soon involved in nationwide protests. Eager to join in, Wałęsa returned to the yard on August 14, famously climbing over the shipyard fence. He emerged, some say by accident, as the workers’ leader and the head of the Solidarity movement, which was taking shape as a new national trade union and political force.

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Wałęsa led a movement of interfactory strike committees from various industries, including the mines, and encouraged a deep worker solidarity that was the basis for the Solidarity organization. Membership in the new trade union swelled to 10 million. The Communist Party leadership had no choice but to negotiate with Solidarity and in August agreed to numerous demands regarding wages and other issues. In November Solidarity became the country’s first legally recognized independent trade union of the post-World War II period. It was also the wider voice of the Polish people, functioning as an opposition political party.

In the months that followed, open debate between Solidarity, the Communist Party, and the Roman Catholic Church blossomed while the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its aging leadership under Leonid Brezhnev looked on anxiously. In Poland the economic situation deteriorated so much that rationing of basic foodstuffs had to be introduced. On December 13, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland’s head of government, declared martial law. Solidarity was banned and Wałęsa was arrested and interned. He was released in November 1982 and martial law was lifted in July 1983. That December Wałęsa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, partly to maintain pressure on the Polish authorities. Afraid that he would not be readmitted if he left the country to collect the prize, Wałęsa remained in Poland. His wife Danuta traveled to Oslo, Norway, on her husband’s behalf.

Throughout the 1980s Jaruzelski tried unsuccessfully to reestablish the pre-1980 order in which the Communist Party ran Poland. The union was re-legalized in April 1989 and won an astounding victory in a semifree election in June. The first Solidarity government was formed in September with Tadeusz Mazowiecki as prime minister. Wałęsa remained on the sidelines as leader of the Solidarity trade union, his eyes on the state presidency.

III

President of Poland

In mid-1990 the Solidarity movement began to fragment, and leading Solidarity figures became engaged in bitter disputes over policy and personalities. When Wałęsa stood for election as president in October 1990, he was challenged by his own prime minister, Mazowiecki, and a Polish-Canadian businessman, Stanislaw Tymiński. Having gained the presidency, Wałęsa became increasingly active on the political stage, making and breaking governments and prime ministers. At first he had to operate in a relatively hostile setting with a Communist-dominated parliament. In October 1991, however, the first genuinely free elections of the postwar period were held. With 29 parties represented, the newly elected parliament was highly fragmented, giving Wałęsa even greater room for political activity. An unstable parliamentary situation led to new elections in September 1993, and a coalition of parties with links to the Communist Party, which was disbanded in 1990, was returned to power. Over the next two years Wałęsa used his presidential base as part of the wider struggle against the ruling parties.

Many observers believe that Wałęsa overplayed his hand from 1993 through 1995, earning a nuisance reputation that displeased many Poles. The confrontational Wałęsa tried to exert too much control over government, from handpicking prime ministers to stalling on signing the nation’s budget when it failed to meet his approval. The presidential election in November 1995 became a straight fight between post-Communism, represented by Aleksander Kwaśniewski, and Solidarity. Wałęsa narrowly lost the election, taking 48.3 percent of the votes to Kwaśniewski’s 51.7 percent. After his defeat, Wałęsa played a marginal role on the political scene. In 1996 he returned to work at the Gdańsk shipyard in protest of a law that barred ex-presidents from collecting a pension; he remained at the shipyard for only one morning and within a month he was granted a pension.

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