Lech Wałęsa

Lech Wałęsa is a former Polish trade union leader and president. Born in Popowo in 1943, he became an electrician at the Gdańsk shipyard in 1967 and helped lead strikes in December 1970. Fired in 1976, he organized free trade unions and in August 1980 led the Gdańsk shipyard strike that produced the Gdańsk Agreement and the Solidarity union. Interned under martial law from December 1981 to November 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. He led the opposition at the 1989 Round Table talks, was elected president in December 1990 and lost to Aleksander Kwaśniewski in 1995. He founded the Lech Wałęsa Institute and holds no public office.

Wałęsa is celebrated in Poland and abroad as the leader of a peaceful mass movement that helped end communist rule and open the way to the 1989 revolutions in Central Europe. Critics argue that his presidency was marked by a confrontational style and conflicts with former Solidarity allies that contributed to frequent changes of government, and he won only about 1 percent when he ran again in 2000. Allegations that he was a paid secret police informant code-named "Bolek" have followed him for decades: a lustration court cleared him in 2000, but documents seized by the Institute of National Remembrance in 2016 renewed the dispute. Wałęsa has called the files forgeries.