Wałęsa, Lech (1943–)

Lech wałęsa was a trade union activist, a leader of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and the first president of postcommunist Poland. Wałęsa was born in Popowo (Poland) in a Catholic peasant family. He graduated from vocational school with training as an electrician. After having worked for 4 years as a farm machinery mechanic, in 1967 he began working at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk as an electrician. Important for the formation of Wałęsa's dissident identity was the violent reaction of the communist government to workers' demonstrations in 1970. For his involvement in the protests, Wałęsa was detained for a short period. He later returned to his work in the Lenin Shipyard, but in 1976 he acted as one of the leaders in workers' strikes and was dismissed from his post. Subsequently, he got involved in dissident activities, the most important among them in the organization of independent trade unions. During the workers' strikes in the Lenin Shipyard in 1980, Wałęsa was appointed leader of the Inter-Factory Strike Committee. He negotiated with the government representatives the famous Gdansk Agreement, which extended the scope of workers' civic and socioeconomic rights and allowed the formation of an independent self-governing trade union, later named Solidarność (Solidarity). At the First Solidarity Congress in Gdansk in 1981, Wałęsa was appointed chairman of the union.

After the introduction of martial law in 1981 and the subsequent ban of Solidarity, Wałęsa was interned and detained for 11 months. On his release in 1982, Wałęsa continued underground activities in spite of the continued surveillance of the security services. He received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, as well as a number of other prestigious awards recognizing his activism, such as the Freedom Medal (1981), International Democracy Awards (1982), and Social Justice Award (1983). He was named Man of the Year by the Financial Times, Time, the Observer, and other publications as well as earning more than 30 honorary doctorates (among others, from Columbia University, the University of Paris, and Harvard University). In 1989, he was the third non-U.S. citizen ever to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress.

In 1989, Wałęsa participated in round table negotiations that concluded in limited parliamentary elections and eventually brought about a noncommunist government in Poland. In 1990, Wałęsa was reelected chairman of Solidarity. Difficulties arose because he exacerbated conflicts within that organization by being particularly critical of its intellectual faction. In 1990, he was elected president of the Polish Republic. The period of his presidency witnessed decline of Wałęsa's domestic popularity, which resulted in his loss in the presidential elections in 1995 against a former member of the Communist Party, Aleksander Kwaśniewski. He has continued his public activism, for example, in a protest against civil rights suppression in Cuba and involvement in the negotiations of the Ukrainian Orange Revolution.