Wałęsa, the son of a carpenter, received only primary and vocational education and in 1967 began work as an electrician at the huge Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. He witnessed the 1970 food riots in Gdańsk in which police killed a number of demonstrators. When new protests against Poland's communist government erupted in 1976, Wałęsa emerged as an antigovernment union activist and lost his job as a result. On August 14, 1980, during protests at the Lenin shipyards caused by an increase in food prices, Wałęsa climbed over the shipyard fence and joined the workers inside, who elected him head of a strike committee to negotiate with management. Three days later the strikers' demands were conceded, but when strikers in other Gdańsk enterprises asked Wałęsa to continue his strike out of solidarity, he immediately agreed. Wałęsa took charge of an Interfactory Strike Committee that united the enterprises of the Gdańsk-Sopot-Gdynia area. This committee issued a set of bold political demands, including the right to strike and form free trade unions, and it proclaimed a general strike. Fearing a national revolt, the communist authorities yielded to the workers' principal demands, and on August 31 Wałęsa and Mieczysław Jagielski, Poland's first deputy premier, signed an agreement conceding to the workers the right to organize freely and independently.
When some 10 million Polish workers and farmers joined semiautonomous unions in response to this momentous agreement, the Interfactory Strike Committee was transformed into a national federation of unions under the name Solidarity (Solidarność), with Wałęsa as its chairman and chief spokesman. Solidarity was officially recognized by the Polish government in October, and Wałęsa steered the federation on a course of carefully limited confrontations with the government in order to avert the possibility of Soviet military intervention in Poland. The federation's gains proved ephemeral, however; on December 13, 1981, the Polish government imposed martial law, Solidarity was outlawed, and most of the leaders of Solidarity were arrested, including Wałęsa, who was detained for nearly a year. The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Peace to Wałęsa in 1983 was criticized by the Polish government; fearing involuntary exile, he remained in Poland while his wife, Danuta, traveled to Oslo, Norway, to accept the prize on his behalf.
As the leader of the now-underground Solidarity movement, Wałęsa was subjected to constant harassment until collapsing economic conditions and a new wave of labour unrest in 1988 forced Poland's government to negotiate with him and other Solidarity leaders. These negotiations led to an agreement that restored Solidarity to legal status and sanctioned free elections for a limited number of seats in the newly restored upper house of the Sejm (Parliament). Solidarity won an overwhelming majority of those seats in June 1989, and after Wałęsa refused to form a coalition government with the communists, the Parliament was forced to accept a Solidarity-led government, though Wałęsa himself refused to serve as premier.
Wałęsa helped his Solidarity colleague Tadeusz Mazowiecki become premier of this government in 1989, but he ran against Mazowiecki for president in 1990 and won Poland's first direct presidential election by a landslide. As president, Wałęsa helped guide Poland through its first free parliamentary elections (1991) and watched as successive ministries converted Poland's state-run economy into a free-market system. Wałęsa had displayed remarkable political skills as the leader of Solidarity, but his plain speech, his confrontational style, and his refusal to approve a relaxation of Poland's strict new prohibitions on abortion eroded his popularity late in his term as president. In 1995 he sought reelection but was narrowly defeated by the former communist Aleksander Kwasniewski, head of the Democratic Left Alliance.
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