Aleksander Kwaśniewski

Aleksander Kwaśniewski, born in 1954, president of Poland (1995-2005). Kwaśniewski was born in Dojlidy, near Białystok on Poland’s northeastern border. He studied economics at Gdańsk University but did not graduate, and in the mid-1970s he worked briefly in Sweden and the United States. On his return to Poland, he joined the Polish United Workers’ Party, also known as the Communist Party. In 1981 Kwaśniewski was appointed editor of a youth newspaper, which was shut down a few months later when General Wojciech Jaruzelski, then the head of Poland’s government, imposed martial law. After the newspaper reopened, Kwaśniewski stayed with the Communist Party and was known for mild resistance to state censors.

In 1984 Kwaśniewski was promoted to editor in chief of Sztandar Młodych, a popular Polish newspaper. A year later, Jaruzelski named him minister for youth and sports. In 1989 Poland’s collapsing Communist government agreed to transfer power to the Solidarity movement, led by Lech Wałęsa; Kwaśniewski headed the delegation negotiating with Wałęsa, who was elected president the following year.

By early 1990, Kwaśniewski had united a group of former Communists into a new party called the Social Democracy of the Polish Republic (SdRP). However, the SdRP gained little popular support. In 1991 Kwaśniewski cofounded the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), a party that included the SdRP and some other leftist and ex-Communist groups. In the same year he was elected to the Sejm, or lower house of parliament. With anti-Communists under President Wałęsa mired in internal disputes, the SLD won a majority of seats in the 1993 parliamentary elections.

In 1995 Kwaśniewski ran for president. A fluent speaker of English and a vegetarian, he traveled the country in a bus, casting himself as a young, Western-style politician who could reconcile political differences and lead Poland into the next century. Like Wałęsa, he pledged to continue Poland’s drive to join the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and he promised to maintain the economic and political reforms achieved after 1989. Kwaśniewski was elected president with 51.7 percent of the vote. Kwaśniewski resigned from leadership of the SLD after winning the presidential election. He won reelection in 2000 for a second five-year term—the maximum allowed—after gaining 53.9 percent of the vote.