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Summary
- Early Life and Solidarity Movement
- Presidency
- Post-Presidency
Key Facts And Information
Let’s find out more about Lech Wałęsa!
Lech Wałęsa is a famous Polish leader who is known for his work as a politician, a trade union leader, and a human rights activist. In August 1980, he was a key player in talks that led to the historic Gdańsk Agreement between the government and striking workers. Because of this success, he became one of the co-founders of Solidarity, Poland’s first independent trade union under communism. In 1990, Wałęsa was elected to the newly restored position of President of Poland. He was in charge of changing the country from a communist system to a post-communist democracy. After his term ended in 1995, he started giving talks on the history and politics of Central Europe at universities and other groups all over the world. He started the Lech Wałęsa Institute in 1996. It is a research and advocacy group that works to promote democracy and help local governments in Poland and other countries.
Lech Wałęsa
EARLY LIFE OF LECH WAŁĘSA AND SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT
- Lech Wałęsa was born in Popowo, Lipno County, Poland, which is now the Kuyavian-Pomeranian region. At the time, it was under Nazi German control. Before Lech was born, his father, Bolesław Wałęsa, was a carpenter and was sent to a forced labour camp. After the Second World War, he came back home, but died two months later from illness and exhaustion. People often say that Lech’s mother, Feliksa Wałęsa, helped shape his values and determination.
- Feliksa married her brother-in-law, Stanisław Wałęsa, a farmer, after her husband died. Lech had three older full siblings and three younger half-brothers when he was a child. His mother and stepfather moved to the United States (US) in 1973 to find work. Feliksa later died in a car accident, and Stanisław died of a heart attack; both were buried in Poland. Wałęsa finished his primary and vocational education in 1961 and became a certified electrician. From 1962 to 1964, he worked as a car mechanic.
- After 1964, Lech served in the military for two years and rose to the rank of corporal. He started working as an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk on 12 July 1967.
- Lech Wałęsa has always been very dedicated to protecting the rights and well-being of regular workers. In 1968, he showed how strongly he believed in what he stood for by openly opposing the government’s stance on recent student protests. He told his fellow shipyard workers to stay away from official rallies that condemned the demonstrators. This act of defiance showed that he was brave and could inspire others, which would soon make him a key figure in Poland’s labour movement.
- Two years later, in December 1970, Wałęsa helped organise illegal protests at the Gdańsk Shipyard against the government’s sudden decision to raise food prices. Sadly, the protests ended badly, with more than 30 workers dying.
- This terrible event, which affected both Wałęsa personally and the whole country, made him even more convinced that Poland needed significant political and social changes.
- He had to pay a price for getting more involved in labour activism. Wałęsa was fired from his job at the Gdańsk Shipyard in June 1976 because he kept joining underground unions, protesting in public, and trying to honour those who died in the 1970 protests. Over the next few years, he worked as an electrician for several companies, but his reputation as a dissident made it difficult for him to find steady employment. Wałęsa was laid off many times and had to go long periods without work, all while the Polish secret police were always watching him.
- He was arrested several times for his actions, and his home and workplaces were bugged. Wałęsa would not be quiet, even though these problems arose. He became a member of the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR), which helped workers and their families whom the government was targeting after strikes and protests. By June 1978, he was even more committed when he joined the underground Free Trade Unions of the Coast. He kept building a network of activists who were determined to fight for workers’ rights. On 14 August 1980, food prices went up again, which led to a massive strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. This was a significant turning point. Wałęsa is well-known for climbing over a fence to get into the shipyard, where he quickly became one of the main leaders.
- With his help, the strike spread to other factories in the area and all over Poland. Wałęsa was in charge of the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee, which organised workers from more than 20 plants. The signing of the historic Gdańsk Agreement on 31 August 1980 was the end of these efforts. The agreement gave workers the right to strike and form their own unions. Soon after, Solidarity (Solidarność) was officially formed, and Wałęsa was chosen to be its leader.
- Solidarity quickly grew to over 10 million members, which is about one-fourth of Poland’s population. This made it a powerful social and political force.
- In March 1981, Wałęsa met with General Wojciech Jaruzelski to try to solve the country’s problems, but the government and Solidarity’s tensions kept getting worse. Jaruzelski declared martial law on 13 December 1981, banned Solidarity, and told the police to arrest its leaders.
- Wałęsa spent 11 months in prison in a number of different places. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 for his work leading nonviolent resistance while he was back at the Gdańsk Shipyard. His wife, Danuta, accepted the award for him so that he would not have to worry about not being able to go back to Poland. Wałęsa was still active in underground Solidarity work throughout the 1980s, and the police often questioned him. His determination led to a breakthrough: the Round Table Negotiations of 1989. The Round Table Negotiations were government-initiated talks with the banned trade union Solidarity and other opposition groups to defuse growing social unrest.
- Wałęsa travelled all over the country to get people to support the talks as an unofficial leader of the opposition. The talks led to the legal reinstatement of Solidarity and elections that were only partly free.
- The Solidarity candidates won by a wide margin, and Wałęsa played a crucial role in bringing former Communist allies together to form a government. This made it possible for Tadeusz Mazowiecki to be the first non-Communist Prime Minister of Poland in more than forty years.
PRESIDENCY OF LECH WALĘSA
- Wałęsa was unhappy after the historic parliamentary elections in June 1989, when some of his former allies chose to work with members of the former Communist party. He ran for president again because he thought the country needed stronger leadership. His campaign slogan was “I do not want to, but I have to” (Nie chcę, ale muszę). Wałęsa won the presidential election on 9 December 1990, beating Mazowiecki and other candidates.
- He became Poland’s first freely elected head of state in 63 years and its first non-Communist leader in 45 years. In 1993, three years later, he started his political group called the Nonpartisan Bloc for Support of Reforms (BBWR). The name of the group was similar to that of a previous group led by Marshal Józef Piłsudski from 1928 to 1935, which was also described as a non-political movement. Wałęsa led Poland through a significant time of change as president. He was in charge of putting the Balcerowicz Plan into action.
Northern Group of Forces, in Borne Sulinowo, Poland
- The plan’s goal was to move the economy from a centrally planned system to a free-market model and privatise industries. Poland held its first entirely free parliamentary elections in 1991 while he was in charge. This was the start of a new era in Poland’s role in world politics. Wałęsa was able to get Soviet troops to leave Polish land and cut the country’s foreign debt by a large amount.
- Wałęsa suggested making a regional security alliance in the early 1990s that he called “NATO bis.” Some right-wing and populist groups in Poland liked the idea, but not many people outside of Poland did. Lithuania and other newly independent neighbouring states were afraid that it might mean Polish dominance instead of cooperation. Even though he did many good things, Wałęsa received increasing criticism during his presidency. His confrontational style in politics led to what was often called a war at the top, where disagreements between former Solidarity allies led to governments changing hands often, sometimes every year.
- This aggressive style made him increasingly isolated in politics. As he lost experienced political allies, he was surrounded by advisers and associates who many people thought were inexperienced or untrustworthy.
- People did not like Wałęsa as much because he did not have a formal higher education and spoke plainly. People who did not like him said he was undignified, inconsistent in his views, or too authoritarian, which made it seem like he wanted to give himself more power at the expense of parliament.
- Jacek Merkel, his national security advisor, said that Wałęsa was a great union leader but had a hard time as president because he could not delegate power or deal with the complicated government bureaucracy. Also, even though the shift to a market economy was eventually seen as a long-term success, it initially caused a lot of economic problems, which hurt public support for Wałęsa’s government. The Bezpartyjny Blok Wspierania Reform (BBWR) party, led by Wałęsa, was losing power, as shown by the 1993 parliamentary elections, in which the party did poorly. By the middle of the 1990s, only about 10% of people liked him.
- Wałęsa lost by a small margin to Aleksander Kwaśniewski, the head of the post-Communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), in the 1995 presidential election. In the first round, he got 33.11 per cent of the vote, and in the run-off, he got 48.28 per cent. His bad media performance during the campaign hurt his chances even more. In one debate, he awkwardly turned down Kwaśniewski’s handshake and told him to “shake his leg” instead. Wałęsa said he was politically retired after losing.
POST-PRESIDENCY OF LECH WAŁĘSA
- After losing Poland’s 1995 presidential election, Wałęsa initially declared he would return to his previous job as an electrician at the Gdańsk Shipyard. However, he soon chose a different path, embarking on an international lecture tour. He developed three main presentations, which he delivered at universities and public events worldwide. He started the Lech Wałęsa Institute in 1995. It is a think tank to popularise the achievements of Polish Solidarity, educating young people, promoting democracy, and building civil society in Poland and around the world.
- He started a new party in 1997 called the Christian Democracy of the Third Polish Republic. He hoped it would help him win future elections. In the 2000 presidential election, Wałęsa lost badly, getting only 1.01 per cent of the vote. Wałęsa came in seventh place in the polls, and then he said he would no longer be involved in Polish politics. Wałęsa left Solidarity in 2006 because he did not like how the union supported the right-wing Law and Justice party, which was in power at the time, and Lech Kaczyński and Jarosław Kaczyński, twin brothers who were well-known in Solidarity and were now the president and prime minister of Poland.
- The key point of difference was that the Kaczyński party wanted to find and punish anybody who had been implicated in Communist rule and make all the files of the previous Communist secret police public. Before that, only government and parliament members had to disclose any ties to the old security agencies. Wałęsa and his supporters said that the government’s so-called transparency laws could lead to a witch hunt, and that more than 500,000 Poles who may have worked with the Communist secret police could be exposed.
- Wałęsa turned down Lithuania’s Order of Vytautas the Great in 2011 because he was worried about how the Lithuanian government was treating the Polish minority and Polish culture. Wałęsa proposed a political union between Poland and Germany in 2013. Ten Nobel Peace Prize winners, including Wałęsa, wrote to Saudi Arabia in August 2017 to ask them to cease killing 14 young people who had taken part in the protests in Saudi Arabia in 2011 and 2012. Wałęsa thought that current US President Donald Trump’s win in the 2024 US presidential election would be bad for both the US and the world, but he did not say why.
- In March 2025, he and other former Polish political prisoners wrote to Trump to say how horrified and disgusted they were with how he acted during a heated meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This meeting took place while the US was giving aid to Ukraine during the Russian invasion. Wałęsa has aggressively supported Ukraine’s defence, calling on NATO to keep helping and saying that Ukraine must win to safeguard democracy.
Frequently Asked Questions About Lech Wałęsa
- Who is Lech Wałęsa?
Lech Wałęsa is a Polish trade union leader, human rights activist, and former President of Poland (1990–1995).
- Why is Lech Wałęsa famous?
He co-founded Solidarity (Solidarność), the first independent labour union in a communist country, which played a significant role in ending communist rule in Poland.
- What was Solidarity?
Solidarity was a social and political movement that began in the Gdańsk shipyards in 1980. It demanded workers’ rights, democracy, and political reform.