Former president says Poland has wasted its opportunities since Solidarity sowed the seeds of communism's fall
By his own account, Lech Walesa was invited to Egypt at the height of its recent uprising. But the prescription offered by the man who helped negotiate Polish communism out of existence may have taken his would-be hosts by surprise.
"I said: you have here the very rich and the very poor. The poor want to take away from the rich, but the rich will never give to the poor," the former Polish president says.
"I would offer you something similar to communism for two years. I would block all the surpluses [of the rich] and with those surpluses I would say: please, help me cultivate the poor. I would get them working and, through work, they would pay taxes and you would get your money back. But you will never agree to that."
Walesa was right. Whoever invited him (and he refuses to give a name), changed their mind. Sixteen years after leaving office, Walesa is still trusting his political instincts and shooting from the hip. You are never quite sure what you are going to hear.
Poland's most celebrated living son is still in Gdansk, where he rose to fame. But his vantage point over the Baltic port these days is somewhat more elevated than his old worker's flat.
His offices occupy the top floor of the most imposing building in Gdansk's old town, the 16th-century Green Gate, once the residence of Poland's kings. Now it is the headquarters of the ex-electrician, ex-president and father of eight, who can claim – and he repeatedly does claim – to have done more than any other single person to lead Poland out of communism.
When he pronounces, Walesa does not quite invoke the divine right of the Green Gate's earlier, royal residents, but he makes it immediately clear he is not a man troubled by self-doubt.
"I had other people around me to help, but all the major decisions were mine and I gave a victory to the nation," he claims, looking back on his extraordinary days as the Solidarity trade union leader in the 1980s. "If I had to do it again, I would change nothing. I didn't make any mistakes – not major ones anyway."
The side-parted hair and moustache have turned white and, at 67, he presents a significantly rounder figure than the scrappy troublemaker who scaled the Lenin shipyard wall in August 1980 to call for a strike (the section of wall has been preserved in Gdansk Solidarity museum).
There were some more signs of the times. He grips an iPad much of time, takes a picture of his interviewers with his mobile phone and instantly uploads it on to his website.
But in other respects, he has not changed at all from the bulldozing trade union leader and restless president. He has the same angry eyes and the same bristling energy.
Semi-retirement, running a pro-democracy foundation, has not mellowed him. He is as combative and abrupt with journalists as ever.
"First question," he snaps before anyone has sat down. When it comes to having his picture taken at the end, he stands still for a count of three and then brusquely tells the Guardian's photographer to get out.
He is just as impatient with his country. Where outsiders see a stable, self-confident nation advancing steadily towards ever higher levels of prosperity, Walesa sees only opportunities wasted by his successors.
"We made mistakes. We failed our test. Unfortunately in Poland, we have been too busy fighting our own political battles here," he said. "We haven't lost the game quite, but we don't look good at the moment."
Politics is deeply personal for Walesa. Twenty-two years after Solidarity's triumph over communism, the movement has long since torn itself to pieces by repeated schisms. Its world-famous red and white logo – the letters recalling strikers standing shoulder to shoulder and flying the national flag – has lost its unifying power.
Walesa, who formally left the union in 2006, acknowledges it was never going to be possible to maintain the camaraderie that kept Solidarity going through martial law and the constant pressure of the communist police state.
"There have to be differences of opinion, because the unity of those times was a forced unity," he argues. "Some people call it betrayal, but no – this is normality."
However, the fragmentation of Solidarity is painfully personal, due in large part to the spectacular falling out between Walesa and the twin brothers, Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who had been his political advisers during his time at Warsaw's Belvedere Palace.
The brothers formed the conservative Law and Justice Party in 2001, which was committed to the unveiling of past communist spies and informers. They rode a populist wave to power in 2005 and became president and prime minister respectively.
When alleged communist secret police documents from the 1970s surfaced in which Walesa was referred to as Agent Bolek, the Kaczynskis accused him of having been a secret police informer.
He has vehemently denied the charge, winning his case in court and suing the late president Lech Kaczynski for his allegations of collaboration.
The antipathy between the two men arguably saved Walesa's life. When Kaczynski took a planeload of prominent Poles to the commemoration of the Soviet massacre of Polish officers at Katyn a year ago this week, Walesa was not invited. The plane crashed when it was trying to land at Smolensk airport, killing everyone on board.
In Walesa's version of his relationship to the secret police, he was always in control.
"It was all a clever game. It was important to play it to give the impression that I was weak, so as not to be eliminated," he says. "Not for a moment was I on the other side."
A few minutes later, however, he puts the incident in a different, more human, light. "I didn't know I was in a position to refuse to sign [the police documents]. I didn't know the legal position. They said it was minutes, some kind of protocol," he says.
Even before the Bolek affair, Walesa's star was fading dramatically. From his first day in office in 1990, there was widespread disdain about his earthy manners and idiosyncratic use of the Polish language, which many thought were unbecoming of the presidential palace. When he stood again, in 2000, he received 1% of the vote.
"Someone once said that victors are never judged but, in this country, they are," he observes ruefully.
Still the most famous Pole abroad, Walesa has been relegated to something of a footnote in his own country, but never in his own mind. "Some say I lost, but it's rubbish. I won," he declares. "I won but on a different level. My ace won the game."