Poland’s former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Wałęsa claims that the pandemic has left him struggling for money by preventing him from making lucrative paid speaking appearance abroad, each of which can earn him tens of thousands of euros.
In recent months, Wałęsa – who led the Solidarity trade union that help topple Poland’s communist regime – has made a number of comments about being made “bankrupt” by coronavirus restrictions.
Now, speaking to tabloid Super Express, Poland’s first democratically elected president said that the lost opportunities mean he “needs to somehow make money” because his “wife spends more than we have”.
“I don’t know how I can survive like this,” Wałęsa said. “If it all goes on a little longer, I’ll take my bags and collect money outside the church.”
In perhaps tongue-in-cheek comments, the former president added that he might soon need to return to work as an electrician – his original profession, which he took up in the Gdańsk shipyard in 1967 before going on to found Solidarity 13 years later.
“I still remember Ohm’s law, Kirchhoff’s law and a few more things. But, damn it, the current has changed, and I don’t know if those machines won’t kill me now,” he told Super Express.
Wałęsa, who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize “for non-violent struggle for free trade unions and human rights in Poland”, receives a monthly pension of 6,000 zloty (€1,330). That is significantly higher than the average in Poland of around 2,300 zloty.
The former president, who has been an outspoken critic of the current government, has often made remarks about his financial woes in the last year.
“I got used to more money,” he told weekly Wprost in January. “I have a big family, I could allow my family and myself to do many things, and now it’s over. I did not hoard funds because I am an idealist, not a materialist.”
Before Christmas, Wałęsa said in an interview with Polsat News that “no one will get a present” from him because he “is broke”. In November, he told the Rzeczpospolita daily that he had gone “bankrupt” because he was “giving away, not saving up” before the pandemic.
In another interview in October, he said that the 6,000 zloty presidential pension was not enough and that he “cannot manage” because “his wife Danuta spends 7,000 monthly,” reported Super Express.
At the time of the spring lockdown in March last year, Wałęsa warned Super Express about his financial worries, noting that he would forgo “huge” earnings for international lectures. “Lectures in the West? From €10,000 up to €100,000. I make money from western capitalists,” he said.
A keynote speaker booking service currently offers lectures by Wałęsa at a rate between $50,000 and $100,000.
Main image credit: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland/Flickr (under CC BY-ND 2.0)
Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.
