Presidency
The policies of Mikhail Gorbachev also stimulated political reform in Poland. By the close of the tenth plenary session in December 1988, the Communist Party was forced, after strikes, to approach leaders of Solidarity for talks.
From 6 February to 15 April 1989, negotiations were held between 13 working groups during 94 sessions of the roundtable talks. These negotiations "radically altered the shape "of the Polish government and society", and resulted in an agreement which stated that a great degree of political power would be given to a newly created bicameral legislature. It also created a new post of president to act as head of state and chief executive. Solidarity was also declared a legal organization. During the following Polish elections the Communists were allocated 65 percent of the seats in the Sejm, Solidarity won all the remaining elected seats, and 99 out of the 100 seats in the fully elected Senate were also won by Solidarity-backed candidates. Jaruzelski won the presidential ballot by one vote on 19 July 1989.
Jaruzelski was unsuccessful in convincing Wałęsa to include Solidarity in a "grand coalition" with the Communists, and Jaruzelski resigned his position of general secretary of the Polish Communist Party on 29 July 1989. The Communists' two allied parties broke their long-standing alliance, forcing Jaruzelski to appoint Solidarity's Tadeusz Mazowiecki as the country's first non-Communist prime minister since 1948. Jaruzelski resigned as Poland's leader in 1990. He was succeeded by Wałęsa in December. Subsequently, Jaruzelski faced charges for a number of actions such as murder that he committed while he was Defense Minister during the Communist period.
On 31 January 1991, General Jaruzelski retired from the army service.
Read more about this topic: Wojciech Jaruzelski
Famous quotes containing the word presidency:
“I once told Nixon that the Presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hail storm. You’ve got to just stand there and take it.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Some of the offers that have come to me would never have come if I had not been President. That means these people are trying to hire not Calvin Coolidge, but a former President of the United States. I can’t make that kind of use of the office.... I can’t do anything that might take away from the Presidency any of its dignity, or any of the faith people have in it.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“... how often the Presidency has simply meant that a man shall be abused, distrusted, and worked to death while he is filling the great office, and that he should drop into unmerited oblivion when he has left the White House ...”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)