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The former leader of the independent trade union movement Solidarity, which helped bring the communist regime in Poland to a peaceful end in 1989, called Navalna a hero who could win the Nobel Peace Prize.
The 77-year-old former Polish president spoke a day after the Moscow court sentenced Navaln to prison and urged his followers to take to the streets of the capital and other cities.
“He has not yet received the Nobel (Peace) Prize, but he will deserve it if he continues to demonstrate that position,” said Walesa, who won the award in 1983 for his role in leading Solidaridad.
“We need heroes like him, but we also need a different kind of international solidarity to bring about a change in the system in Russia,” Walesa told AFP in an interview in the northern port city of Gdansk, where his fight against the communist regime began. .
On January 17, Navaln was detained at the Moscow airport less than an hour after returning to Russia from Germany, where he was being treated for his nerve-paralyzing substance Novičiok, created by Soviet scientists after his poisoning last summer.
A Moscow court ruled Tuesday that a 44-year-old anti-corruption activist will have to spend two years and eight months behind bars for violating the terms of a probation sentence imposed on him in a 2014 embezzlement case. Navaln, for his part, affirms that those accusations were only a pretext to silence him.
After imprisoning A. Navalnas, the Russian opposition movement lost, at least temporarily, its most prominent figure. Some of his important assistants were also detained by the police.
Walesa said that if he had the opportunity to speak to Navaln, he would be urged to follow Poland’s “Solidarity” example and fight the system.
“I felt that it was not the people to blame, but a system that allowed leaders to misbehave. And you see it in Russia,” he explained.
“We should not fight against (Russian President Vladimir) Putin, against specific people or against the police. Instead, we should fight for a new system to prevent this kind of behavior,” Walesa added.
Working as an electrician at the Gdańsk Shipyard, L. Wallesa shook the communist bloc and the world, becoming an unprecedented 17,000 in 1980. the leader of the workers’ strike.
The communist regime was finally forced to grudgingly recognize Solidarity as the first and only independent union in the Soviet bloc when it received the support of millions of people across Poland.
In 1990, Walesa became the first democratically elected president of Poland after World War II.
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