WARSAW, Poland – Former Polish President Lech Walesa said Saturday that he would found a new opposition group if the governing Law and Justice party wins next month's election.
Walesa, the founder of the pro-democracy Solidarity movement and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is a strong critic of Poland's current leaders — Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who heads Law and Justice, and his twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski.
If the nationalist, conservative Law and Justice wins the Oct. 21 parliamentary election, "I will start a new political structure and a program for mending Poland," Walesa said on private Radio TOK FM.
Walesa, 63, declined to give details of the possible group's program.
In 2005, Law and Justice won parliamentary and presidential elections on promises of rooting out corruption, mending the justice system and improving life for the poorest.
However, that agenda has been undermined by near-constant political instability — culminating in the collapse last month of a wobbly coalition the prime minister formed with two small populist parties, which prompted him to seek a new election two years early.
"We need to bring order in the country after the Kaczynski brothers," Walesa said, charging that the events of the past two years have turned "democracy into a laughing stock."
The Kaczynski twins served as advisers to Walesa in the 1980s and in the early months of his 1990-95 presidency, but they then fell out. The rift has deepened with time.
Walesa remains a prominent commentator on Polish political life, but has faded away from active politics over recent years.
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