Lech
Wałęsa: Throw Poland out of the EU
Poland’s
independence hero has one fight left: upending the country’s
right-wing government.
By JAN
CIENSKI 12/19/16, 5:33 AM CET
GDAŃSK, Poland —
Lech Wałęsa sits at his desk, peering at his computer screen and
poking at the keyboard, before getting up heavily to settle in a worn
armchair, his stomach straining at his shirt. The signature walrus
mustache that makes him the world’s most recognizable Pole is
trimmed a bit closer and completely white.
Lech Wałęsa is an
old man now. But the 73-year-old still has fight left in him.
“I’m on my way
to eternity, but as long as I have strength I don’t want to allow
the destruction of Poland,” he says, sitting in his office in the
European Solidarity Centre, a museum dedicated to the history of
Solidarity, built steps away from the old gates of the Lenin Shipyard
where Wałęsa once worked as an electrician.
Wałęsa has won the
Nobel peace prize and served as Poland’s president. The Solidarity
labor union he led helped end Central European communism. But he
still has one more political goal: to bring down Poland’s ruling
Law and Justice party and end the dominance of its leader Jarosław
Kaczyński. “Kaczyński is breaking principles and the constitution
and the laws and principles of the separation of powers,” says
Wałęsa. “He’s dangerous and irresponsible. It’s going to turn
out badly.”
The question is if
Wałęsa can leverage the affection in which most Poles hold him into
a political force. He hasn’t been relevant in politics since losing
the presidency in 1995; an attempted comeback in 2000 garnered him
just 1 percent of the vote.
With
not much to keep him at home, Wałęsa has long bridled at being
shunted aside by younger generations of politicians.
Since then, he’s
been giving paid speeches and riding on his past glory. He’s also a
frequent commentator on current politics and a keen blogger, although
some of his observations bear the hallmarks of someone who’s spent
a lot of time on the internet. During one interview a few years ago,
he swerved into talking about anti-gravity devices. This time, he
veers into the weeds once again, wondering aloud if there are too
many people in Poland, and how nice the country’s landscape would
be if there were a lot more forests and wild boars and a lot fewer
towns and cities.
“My husband
exchanged me for a computer,” was how his wife Danuta put it in an
interview after the publication of her 2011 bestseller recounting
their marriage difficulties.
With not much to
keep him at home, Wałęsa has long bridled at being shunted aside by
younger generations of politicians. And today, the old warhorse is
sniffing at the possibility of a return to relevance.
Instead of sitting
in quiet retirement, he’s taken to the road in an attempt to create
a national movement for a referendum calling for new elections and
taken to lobbying the European officials who make it a point to swing
by his office, urging them to take a harder line with his country’s
government.
Poland is already in
trouble with the European Commission, which instituted an
unprecedented rule of law procedure against Warsaw after it hamstrung
the country’s top constitutional court. But Wałęsa is not
satisfied with what he sees as mostly empty words. He wants action.
Specifically, he wants Brussels to threaten to revoke Poland’s
membership in the bloc if the Law and Justice party continues to
break democratic rules.
“I don’t like
speaking against Poland, but I have no choice,” he says. “It has
to be that if you belong to a club but don’t fit then they throw
you out. Losing the right to vote [in the EU] is too little. They
have to throw us out.”
Warsaw has ignored
the Commission demands, says it has “ended cooperation” with the
Council of Europe, the Continent’s human rights watchdog, and pays
no heed to regular condemnations in the European Parliament.
Old enemies
Wałęsa and
Jarosław Kaczyński, 67, have known each other for decades, and they
share a mutual animosity — hate is not too strong a term.
In a recent
interview with the foreign press, Kaczyński told reporters “not to
treat Wałęsa seriously,” saying the former Solidarity leader has
“great intellectual deficits, character defects and a terrible
past.” Wałęsa, he added, had “discredited himself.”
Jarosław’s twin
brother Lech, a former Polish president killed in a 2010 plane crash,
was a leading anti-communist activist and was one of the advisers to
Wałęsa and other union leaders during the 1980 strike at the Gdańsk
shipyard that led to the creation of Solidarity.
After Poland’s
communist government declared martial law in 1981, Wałęsa and Lech
Kaczyński spent time in prison. As Jarosław was only a minor player
in the opposition, the authorities didn’t bother interning him.
In the roundtable
talks between Solidarity and the government in 1989 leading to the
end of communist rule, the Kaczyńskis served as advisers to Wałęsa,
only to fall out with their patron not long after his successful 1990
presidential campaign. Within a couple of years, Jarosław Kaczyński
was leading loud anti-Wałęsa protests through central Warsaw.
They’ve been bitter enemies ever since.
Kaczyński’s
disdain of Wałęsa is both personal and political. He’s upset that
Wałęsa is seen as Poland’s liberator from communism, feeling his
brother gets short shrift from historians. “The powerful figure
really running the union was my brother,” Kaczyński said earlier
this year — a claim Wałęsa dismissed as “nonsense,” adding
that he fired the twins because they were unreliable and dangerous.
Attacking Wałęsa
is a core part of Kaczyński’s political message. He likes to argue
that the post-1989 transformation was deeply flawed and that Wałęsa
bears the blame for a deal that allowed the communists to exchange
political power for being allowed to hang onto their economic gains.
Wałęsa himself has
never admitted to agreeing to cooperate with the secret police,
instead calling it an “incident” in his past.
Wałęsa insists
that the transformation was a huge success, pointing out that Poland
has been one of Europe’s fastest growing economies for decades. “We
made maximum use of our victory and the EU to lift up Poland,” says
Wałęsa. “Today’s Poland is different. Remember those roads and
those horses? Now I sometimes get lost in Gdańsk because so much has
changed. “
He does recognize
that many people were left behind by a tumultuous quarter-century of
economic reforms. “We did one thing wrong, we forgot about the
people, we forgot we had to help them,” he says.
It was Kaczyński
who managed to target those disaffected people with generous social
spending promises — one of the reasons his party won last year’s
parliamentary and presidential elections. And now that he controls
the country, he wants to reshape the historical narrative and in
particular Wałęsa’s role.
Agent Bolek
The biggest blemish
in Wałęsa’s biography comes from 1970, when he was a young worker
and labor organizer in the wake of a bloody military crackdown
against striking shipyard workers. There is pretty strong evidence
that he was cowed by the secret police and signed an agreement to
inform for them, obtaining the code name “Bolek.” He was
apparently stricken from the rolls of agents in 1976 due to a lack of
cooperation.
Wałęsa himself has
never admitted to agreeing to cooperate with the secret police,
instead calling it an “incident” in his past and saying in
interviews that he played “games” with the secret police and
tried to trick them. He was cleared of the accusation of being a
collaborator by a special court in 2000.
“If I were
unimportant, no one would have noticed me,” he says when asked
about the accusations. “When they say these sorts of things, it
means that I am strong.” At an anti-government demonstration this
summer, hundreds of protesters showed up wearing cardboard walrus
mustaches to show their support for the old leader.
It’s that base of
affection and respect that Wałęsa hopes to tap into as he makes his
regular trips around the country to build opposition to the
government and to Kaczyński.
“I am a practicing
Catholic, and I will be forced to account for my talents. I have to
use them the best I can. Otherwise I’ll go to hell.”
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