Aleksander Kwasniewski
Aleksander Kwasniewski was a communist minister at thirty-one and the president who took Poland into NATO and the European Union. He came up through the official student organisations of the 1970s and was minister for youth and then for sport in the last communist governments, which meant that in 1989 he was on the wrong side of the round table from the people who won. What he did next was the unusual part: rather than defend the record, he dissolved the party's successor into a conventional social-democratic party, accepted the market settlement and the Western alignment entirely, and rebuilt an electorate out of people whom the transition had cost their jobs. In 1995 he beat Walesa by less than two points. His two terms are the period in which Poland's postwar position was settled. A new constitution was passed by referendum in 1997, ending eight years of improvised arrangements. Poland entered NATO in 1999, which required him to sign the instruments as a former communist official, and the European Union in May 2004 after a referendum he campaigned for personally in every province. He also sent troops to Iraq in 2003 and accepted a zone of occupation, a decision that was unpopular at home and bought less in Washington than he expected, and he later said he had been misled about the weapons. In November 2004 he did the thing he is most likely to be remembered for outside Poland. When the Ukrainian presidential election was falsified and hundreds of thousands occupied the centre of Kyiv, he went there with a European delegation and mediated between the government and the opposition through a fortnight that could plausibly have ended in shooting; the round table produced a re-run and a peaceful transfer. He left office in 2005 with approval ratings no Polish president has matched since.
- Lived: 1954 CE – ?
- Nationality: Polish
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
