Lech Wałęsa Facts For Kids

Lech Wałęsa was born in a small village in Poland during World War II in 1943. His family had a hard life: his father died when Lech was very young, and his mother raised the children with strong determination. He had brothers and sisters and grew up learning to work with his hands.

Lech finished school to become an electrician in 1961 and first fixed cars and machines. In 1967 he started working as an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, a large place where many people worked together. This job helped him see the problems workers faced every day.

Lech Wałęsa ran for president in 1990 with the line, “I don’t want to, but I have to,” meaning he felt he must help his country. On December 9, 1990, he became Poland’s first popularly elected president in many decades, and he served until 1995. Being the first leader of a new democracy was a big job with many new rules to learn.

He sometimes felt disappointed when people who had fought for change chose to work with old leaders. In 1993 he started a new political group called BBWR to support changes he believed Poland needed. Leading a whole country was different from leading a movement, and that brought many new challenges.

Lech Wałęsa is a Polish leader who helped change his country from a one-party state to a democracy. He was born in 1943 and worked as an electrician at a big shipyard in the city of Gdańsk. Because he stood up for workers, he became the leader of Solidarity, a very large workers’ movement that spoke for millions of people. In 1990 he became Poland’s president and served until 1995. He also won big awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize, and many places and honors remember him today, like an airport named after him. What would you do to help people who feel unheard?

At the shipyard, Lech noticed that people who did the work did not always have a say in decisions. He began to speak up for better pay and fair treatment. In 1970 he was part of protests when workers were upset about food prices; those events showed him that bigger change was needed.

He joined others who wanted a legal group for workers, and they started Solidarity. The movement grew to include millions of people from many workplaces and towns. Solidarity talked with the government in talks called the Round Table, and those talks helped lead to partly free elections in 1989. This change helped Poland move toward democracy.

After he lost the 1995 election, Lech Wałęsa planned to return to work as an electrician but instead gave talks around the world about democracy and Solidarity. In 1995 he founded the Lech Wałęsa Institute to teach about civic rights and history. He tried more politics in the late 1990s but did not win and mostly stepped back after 2000.

He also made a choice in 2006 to leave the Solidarity organization because he disagreed with its direction. Today he is remembered for helping change Poland and for being a quiet symbol of ordinary people standing up together.

As president, Wałęsa supported changes that moved Poland toward a free-market economy. He helped hold the country’s first fully free parliamentary elections in 1991 and worked on getting foreign troops to leave and on paying down some national debt. He also spoke in favor of Poland joining groups like NATO and the European Union, which happened a few years after he left office.

Not everyone agreed with him. Some people thought he argued too much or tried to take too much power. He suggested new security ideas that some neighbors found worrying. These disagreements and some mistakes in handling the job made it harder for him to keep wide support.