The man with the mustache made history with his victory over communism in Poland. However, as head of state he was too authoritarian for many people. Even today, Walesa still likes to cause trouble.
Freedom fighter, Nobel Prize winner, president – rarely can an electrician and shipyard worker look back on such an eventful life as Lech Walesa. Today the former union leader turns 80 years old. He remains uncomfortable and argumentative to this day.
How Walesa became famous
In the summer of 1980, the world suddenly looked to Poland. And a small, slight man whose courage is even more impressive than his defiant mustache. Neither he nor the observers suspect that the events at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk will ultimately shake up the entire Eastern Bloc.
Europe is divided, Poland lies behind the Iron Curtain. It is one of the Warsaw Pact states whose politics is dominated by the Soviet Union. The communist regime cannot get the supply problems under control. When the government drastically increased the prices for meat and sausage products on July 2nd, the workers went on strike.
On August 14th, the wave of strikes hit the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. This is the hour for Lech Walesa. The unemployed 36-year-old electrician was fired from the shipyard four years earlier because he advocated the formation of an independent union. Now he is needed.
When the security guard doesn’t let him onto the factory premises, he jumps over the wall without further ado. At least that’s what Walesa later remembered, even if not all of his colleagues at the time confirmed this version.
In any case, Walesa jumps straight into the story. He becomes the leader of the strike in which the workforce occupies the shipyard. He ensures that the negotiations with the shipyard management are broadcast over the loudspeaker system – so everyone can feel involved.
Under Walesa’s leadership, the inter-company strike committee was founded, representing 300 companies. His most important demand: a union that is independent of the party.
“Gdansk Agreement” on the founding of “Solidarnosc”
Walesa negotiated cautiously but persistently with the government for almost two weeks. Gives spontaneous speeches in front of the shipyard gate, speaks with surprising confidence to foreign reporters. The image of the lively labor leader with the Black Madonna on his lapel goes around the world.
The breakthrough came on August 31, 1980: Walesa and Deputy Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Jagielski signed the “Gdańsk Agreement” on the founding of the independent trade union “Solidarnosc”. Never before had a communist regime allowed something like this.
Walesa’s childhood
Lech Walesa was born on September 29, 1943 in the village of Popowo in Kuyavian-Pomeranian. He grew up in poor conditions and as a child had to help in the family’s small farm. “I had to walk four kilometers to school and seven kilometers to church, mostly barefoot, with my shoes over my shoulder.
They were only put on in front of the entrance,” he remembers in his autobiography “Path of Hope.” He completed vocational training and worked as an electrical mechanic, joining the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in 1967.
Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize
The independent trade union Solidarnosc, which Walesa co-founded, is a huge success. Shortly after its founding, it had ten million members – the whole of Poland had 35.5 million inhabitants at the time.
But on December 13, the communist regime, under pressure, declared martial law. Solidarnosc was banned, Walesa was interned and released in November 1982. The following year he received the Nobel Peace Prize.
The real winner is the Polish people, he comments with rather untypical modesty. Walesa’s wife Danuta accepts the prize: he himself fears that he might be refused permission to return to Poland.
Not popular as a politician
Walesa was present at the round table talks that initiated the communists’ peaceful departure from power in 1989. In 1990 he became Poland’s president – the culmination of his decades-long struggle seemed to have been reached.
But his efforts for a second term in 1995 failed: he fell out with former colleagues and alienated others with his authoritarian demeanor. A political comeback is no longer possible.
In recent years, Walesa has often felt misunderstood and not sufficiently appreciated. He broke with the Solidarity leadership. “This is no longer my union,” he reiterated.
Walesa is considered a sharp critic of the national conservative Law and Justice party (PiS), which has been in power since 2015. Party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, once one of Walesa’s advisors, has been at loggerheads with the former labor leader for years.
Kaczynski is one of Walesa’s opponents from the Solidarity camp who are still convinced to this day that the future workers’ leader was hired as an informer for the security service – something Walesa has always vigorously denied. The two litigated against each other for years.
And today?
Recently things have become quieter around Walesa. On social media, he often posts pictures of himself on bike rides on the Polish Baltic Sea coast, but also in occasional interviews. Politics never completely left him:
On June 4, he marched in Warsaw alongside opposition leader Donald Tusk in a demonstration with hundreds of thousands of participants against the PiS’s policies. The former electrician had some advice for the younger generation: “I always looked at all things, problems and difficulties from the perspective of a practitioner.”