Lech Walęsa
Lech Wałęsa 
[шl urge vaεw transformationnsa] (?·i) (/lej vawensa/ en fonética española; Popowo, voivodato de Cuyavia y Pomerania, 29 September 1943) is a Polish politician, former trade unionist and human rights activist. He was co-founder of Solidarity, the first free trade union in the Eastern Bloc, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, and was president of Poland from 1990 to 1995, being succeeded by Aleksander Kwaśniewski.
Biography
Lech Wałęsa was born on September 29, 1943 in Popowo, Poland, the son of a carpenter. He studied elementary school and vocational training before joining the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk as an electrical technician in 1967. In 1969 he married Danuta Gołoś, and the couple had eight children.
He was a member of the illegal strike committee at the Gdańsk shipyard in 1970. After the bloody end of the strike, in which around 80 workers were killed by riot police, Wałęsa was arrested and convicted of “anti-social behaviour”, spending a year in prison.
Due to partisan political reasons, many accusations have been made against many politicians in Poland, including a publication edited by the Institute of Polish National Memory in 2008, assuring that Walesa had collaborated with the Polish communist secret services in the 1970s, before going over to the opposition.
In 1978, together with Andrzej Gwiazda and Aleksander Hall, he organized the underground movement Free Trade Union of Pomerania (Wolne Związki Zawodowe Wybrzeża). He was arrested several times in 1979 for developing an "anti-state" organization, but was not found guilty at trial and was released in early 1980, after which he returned to the Gdańsk shipyard.
Trade union leader
On August 14, 1980, after the start of a labor strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Wałęsa illegally scaled its wall and became a strike leader. This strike was spontaneously followed by others, all over Poland. Several days later he stopped the workers who wanted to leave the Gdańsk shipyard and persuaded them to organize the Strike Coordination Committee (Międzyzakładowy Komitet Strajkowy) to lead and support the spontaneous general strike in Poland.
In September of that year, the communist government signed and agreed with the Strike Coordination Committee to allow the legalization of the organization, but not truly free unions. The Strike Coordination Committee was legalized as the National Coordination Committee of the Free Solidarity Trade Union, and Wałęsa was elected chairman of that committee.
Wałęsa remained in that post until December 1981, when Prime Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law. He was imprisoned for 11 months in southeastern Poland near the border with the Soviet Union until November 14, 1982.
In 1983 he applied to return to the Gdańsk Shipyard, to his former position as an electrician. While he was formally treated as a "simple employee," he was practically under house arrest until 1987. Also in 1983 he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He was unable to collect the prize himself, for fear that the government would not let him return. His wife, Danuta Wałęsa, received the award in his place. Wałęsa donated the amount of the prize to the Solidarity movement, temporarily exiled, and based in Brussels. The decision to award him the Nobel Peace Prize has not been without controversy for the communists, since by some it is considered that Wałęsa contributed to the political and economic destabilization of Poland in its fight against the communist regime.
After eight days, the government agreed to enter into roundtable talks in September. Wałęsa was the informal leader of the non-governmental side during these talks. In them, the government signed and agreed to reestablish the Solidarity union and organize "semi-free" to the Polish parliament.
In 1989 Wałęsa organized and led the Citizens Committee of the President of the Solidarity Union being only a body of advisers, but in practice it was a type of political party, which won the parliamentary elections of 1989. (The opposition took all the seats of the Sejm and all but one of the seats in the recently reestablished Senate; according to the Round Table Agreements only members of the Communist Party and their allies could hold the remaining 64% of the Sejm seats).
While technically solely the president of the Solidarity Union, Wałęsa played a key role in Polish politics. In late 1989 he persuaded leaders of formal allies of the communists to form a non-communist government coalition, which would be the first non-communist government in the Soviet bloc's sphere of influence.[citation needed ] After this agreement, to the great surprise of the Communist Party, the parliament elected Tadeusz Mazowiecki as Prime Minister of Poland. Thus, Poland, which was still in theory a communist country, began to change its economy to a free market system. However, his leadership was marked by an economic crisis that led to the defeat of the charismatic leader and brought to power the former communist politician Aleksander Kwaśniewski.
President of Poland (1990-1995)
On December 9, 1990, Wałęsa won the presidential election and became president of Poland for the next five years. During his presidency, he started a so-called "war in the head" that practically involved an annual change of government. According to his detractors, in this period Wałęsa stole thousands of secret documents from the PPR Ministry of the Interior with information about his activities during the 1980s; some experts on the subject have claimed to have evidence that the files were never returned and that the former Solidarity leader worked for Western intelligence services under the pseudonym "Bolek"; a defecting communist, but Walesa's defenders deny such accusations and others point to the intricate internal politics in Poland as the cause of these accusations.
In 1993, he said he totally disassociated himself from the Solidarity movement, after they did not allow him to create a new movement ahead of the elections in September of that year. Under his presidency, Poland changed completely, from a communist regime under the influence of the The Soviet Union to a capitalist country carried out the closure of state companies and a strong financial and monetary readjustment plan, which triggered an escalation in prices and hyperinflation.
Walesa's attitude had its most notorious manifestation on June 5, 1992 when he forced the resignation of Prime Minister Jan Olszewski, who had led a coalition government of centrists, agrarians, and National-Catholics since December 1991 when he accused Walesa to prepare a coup with the involvement of a sector of the Army. Added to various acts of corruption carried out by ministers and relatives of Walesa. Poland was an exemplary case of transition to a market economy. In 1995, Poland ranked second to last among 30 countries in child poverty and fourth in income inequality; the richest 10% of the population earned a higher share of market income and paid a lower share of the tax burden than in any other OECD state. Privatizations hit the social sectors (pensions, health care and education) hardest, while state support extended to private companies but not to citizens. The first consequence was the drastic devaluation of the zloty (the national currency) by approximately 25-30% in a period of six months – and the collapse of Polish wages. In the 14 months unemployment rose from 3.99% to 12.8% since the crisis When Solidarity union leader Lech Walesa was elected president in 1990, the country fell into an economic and financial crisis. The basic energy supply experienced serious difficulties in the 1990s. After economic liberalization, steel production stagnated and declined by 73 percent in the period 1990-1994, which together with the closure of state factories led to unemployment for a million Polish workers. In the agricultural area there was a decrease of between 40% and 50% of the cereal, potato, sugar, beet and fruit harvests between 1991 and 1995, tripling food costs. By the end of 1994, the GDP of had reduced by 7.3% compared to 1990, inflation reached 87%, and national reserves in gold and foreign currency decreased by more than 70 percent.
Within Solidarity, he also maneuvered against his critics, such as Bronislaw Geremek, whose dismissal as KKS senior adviser he managed, or Michnik himself, who was able to remain director of Gazeta Wyborzca, the union's press organ, due to the unanimous reaction of the staff of journalists. On June 24, 63 prominent members resigned, including Michnik and Kuron. Walesa campaigned with demagogic and authoritarian overtones of the right, and presented himself as a providential candidate who would erase Poland's problems with a stroke of the pen. However, his style of presidency was strongly criticized by most political parties, and he lost much of his initial public support in late 1995. The Center Agreement (CP), launched on May 12, 1990 by the twin brothers Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski to support Walesa's presidential aspirations, came in sixth place in the legislative elections of October 27, 1991 with 8.7% of the vote and 44 seats. In the following elections Walesa was thus able to continue Go ahead with your presidential bid. But on election day he only received a testimonial 1.1% of the vote and trailed six other candidates. Wałęsa supported Poland's entry into NATO and the European Union which occurred after his presidency, in 1999 and 2004 respectively. In the early 1990s, he proposed the creation of a subregional security system called NATO bis. The concept was supported by right-wing and populist movements in Poland, but gained little support abroad and from Poland's neighbours; some of whom (for example Lithuania) saw it as a Polish neo-imperialism
Wałęsa lost the 1995 presidential election. After the election he announced that he would go into political retirement, but has remained active, trying to establish his own political party. In 1997 he supported and helped organize Solidarity Electoral Action (Akcja Wyborcza Solidarność), which won the elections to parliament [citation needed ] . However, his support was of lesser significance and Wałęsa occupied a very low position in this match. The actual leader of the party and its main organizer was the new leader of the Solidarity union, Marian Krzaklewski.
Results in presidential elections
- 1990: 74.25 % (second round)
- 1995: 48.28 % (second round)
- 2000: 1.01 % (first round)
Life after the presidency
Lech Wałęsa ran for president again in the 2000 elections, but received only 1% of the vote. Many Poles were unhappy with the fact that he will once again try to regain political power from him after announcing his withdrawal. Since that time he has been lecturing on the history and politics of Central Europe at various foreign universities.
On May 10, 2004, Gdańsk International Airport was officially renamed Gdańsk-Lech Wałęsa Airport in his honor. His signature has been incorporated into the airport logo. There was some controversy about whether the name should be spelled Lech Walesa (without diacritics, but more easily recognizable in the world) or Lech Wałęsa (with the Polish spelling, but more difficult). to write or pronounce for foreigners). A month later, Wałęsa came to the United States representing Poland for Ronald Reagan's state funeral.
Lech Walesa has shown on multiple occasions his dissatisfaction with the political direction the country has taken, in particular with the Kaczyński brothers, who were his former union colleagues and whom he has accused of opportunistic demagogues who have led Poland into the wrong direction.
In addition to his Nobel Prize, Wałęsa has received other international awards. He has been distinguished with the title of doctor honoris causa, by several European and American universities. The last one, in January 2011, was the European University of Madrid, Spain.
Controversy
Wałęsa is known for his fervent Catholicism. On March 1, 2013, Wałęsa declared that homosexual deputies should sit outside Parliament, since they represent a minority. As Lech Wałęsa would later state: “I don't want this minority, with whom I don't agree but that I tolerate, it manifests itself in the street and makes my children and grandchildren's heads turn”.
Wałęsa also said that homosexuals are of little importance as a minority and therefore have to “adjust to small things”, to which Robert Biedroń, a member of Parliament, responded: “If we accept the rules proposed by Lech Wałęsa, then where will the blacks sit? They are also a minority. And what about people with disabilities?
In 2008 Slawomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk conducted research on behalf of the Polish Institute of Historical Memory and published a book hinting at Walesa's collaboration with the communist regime and his work as a government confidante between 1970 and 1972. “Bolek” (alleged Walesa code name) would have received money in exchange for denouncing the activities of at least 40 co-workers at the Gdansk shipyard. The documentation provided includes receipts supposedly signed in handwriting by Walesa with her name and nickname. In 2015, a dossier containing 41 reports signed by “Bolek” and receipts for a total value of 11,700 zlotys was found at a home.
In 2008, the government of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela told Walesa that it considered him persona non grata and prevented him from visiting the country's political prisoners.
In 2021, at the age of 78, he stated that he did not have enough money, that his pension was low and that he needed work.
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