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Lech Wałęsa

(b. 19 Sept. 1943).

President of Poland 1990–5

Trade union leader

Born in Popovo, he became an electrician and worked at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk (Danzig). He became the leader of the Solidarność (Solidarity) movement in September 1980, and was imprisoned following the imposition of martial law on 13 December 1981. Released in November 1982, he remained the symbol of popular opposition to Communist rule, and in 1983 received the Nobel Peace Prize. The Communist Party was finally forced to legalize the outlawed Solidarność in 1989, whose membership grew rapidly to become ten million strong. Increasing quarrels with his erstwhile protégé, Tadeusz Mazoviecki (b. 1927), who was elected Prime Minister on 24 August 1989, split the movement when WaVęsa decided to stand for the presidency against him.

Presidency

The first freely elected President of Poland for fifty years, in his controversial term of office he sought to strengthen the presidency at the expense of parliament and thus personally brought down at least two of the six Prime Ministers who served under him

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Lech Wałęsa

President of Poland from 1990 to 1995

"Wałęsa" redirects here. For other uses, see Wałęsa (disambiguation).

Lech Wałęsa^[a] (Polish pronunciation:[ˈlɛɣvaˈwɛ̃sa]^ⓘ; born 29 September 1943) is a Polish statesman, dissident, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who served as the president of Poland between 1990 and 1995. After winning the 1990 election, Wałęsa became the first democratically elected president of Poland since 1926 and the first-ever Polish president elected by popular vote. A shipyard electrician by trade, Wałęsa became the leader of the Solidarity movement and led a successful pro-democratic effort, which in 1989 ended Communist rule in Poland and ushered in the end of the Cold War.

While working at the Lenin Shipyard (now Gdańsk Shipyard), Wałęsa, an electrician, became a trade-union activist, for which he was persecuted by the government, placed under surveillance, fired in 1976, and arrested several times. In August 1980, he was instrumental in political negotiations that led to the ground-breaking Gdańsk Agreement between striking

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Lech Walesa

Let’s go back to the beginning. I’d like you to introduce us to Lech Walesa as you were at age ten. Who are you? Where are you living?

Lech Walesa: I live in a village. It’s the year 1952-53. So that means it’s the post-war time. There is a lot of poverty. I am in the third grade of a primary school. I walk five kilometers to go to school, a long way. Then seven kilometers on foot after school to go to church, and that’s every day.

What do your parents hope for you at this point?

Lech Walesa: I believe they really cared about survival until the next day, how to make a living. Perhaps they wondered, “What will he grow into? What kind of a man will he be?” because I was really a very lively child. I really needed to break at least one window every month, and to get into mischief, so they must have wondered.

How many children were there in the family?

Lech Walesa: It was a combined family as I would call it. My father died on returning from the war, and his brother took care of my mother and of my family because my fat