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Lech Walesa, a symbol of Poland’s anti-communist struggle, drew attention to populism on Monday at a time when his deeply divided country marks 40 years since the historic agreement that gave rise to the independent trade union movement Solidarity, reports AFP. Agerpres.
Concerns about the state of democracy in Poland have arisen since 2015, when the nationalist populist Law and Justice (PiS) party came to power and began introducing controversial reforms, criticized within and outside the country.
“People today choose populists and demagogues because they promise change. They (populists, no) have correctly diagnosed (today’s problems, no), but their remedy is bad,” Lech Walesa told hundreds of people gathered at the shipyards. from Gdansk on the Baltic coast of Poland.
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It was in this place, on August 31, 1980, that the agreement signed between the communist regime and the striking workers of the place, led by Lech Walesa, then an electrician, allowed the creation of Solidarity, the first free union of the Soviet bloc.
“We need to win back the initiative of these populists and demagogues and replace it with more informed solutions and better structures,” said Walesa, 76, surrounded by former comrades in arms. Then he placed flowers on the door of the shipyard, which he opened symbolically, as he did four decades ago.
The communist regime backtracked on this agreement in 1981, when it imposed Martial Law to Crush Solidarity, which then numbered 10 million members, or more than a quarter of Poles.
Solidarity survived in hiding and returned, albeit weaker, to easily win the first semi-free elections on June 4, 1989, thus hastening the fall of communism throughout the Soviet bloc.
Winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, Lech Walesa became the first democratically elected Polish president in 1990.
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To mark the anniversary, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said of the Gdansk shipyard workers who created Solidarity that they were “European heroes of freedom”, noting that they had “launched a movement that ultimately led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. and the end of the Iron Curtain. “
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