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Lech Walesa (1943- )Polish trade union leader and president. Born on 19 September 1943 in Popowo, he became an electrician and worked at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk in Communist Poland. In September 1980, he became a leader of the Solidarnosc (Solidarity) movement, which demanded trade union rights and civil liberties. When martial law was imposed on the country on 13 December 1981, he was imprisoned. Released in November 1982, he became a potent symbol of resistance to Communist rule and was awarded the Nobel peace prize the following year. After the ruling Communist party finally legalised Solidarnosc in 1989, the movement grew rapidly, eventually comprising 10 million members. On 9 December 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of Communism in the neighbouring Soviet Union, Walesa became the first freely elected president of Poland for 50 years. A devout Catholic, and inclined to authoritarian methods of rule when in government, Walesa's presidency was controversial because he tried to strengthen his own powers at the expense of parliament. Badly educated and sometimes inarticulate, his approval rating in opinion polls dropped to 5% in 1994, and he was defeated in the 1995 election by Aleksander Kwasniewski, an ex-Communist. Walesa was responsible, more than any other individual, for the collapse of Communism in Poland. However, he failed to bring stability to the new democratic state, although he did bolster the role of the Roman Catholic Church and helped liberalise the market economy. |
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