In the wake of the June 1989 elections, in which Solidarity candidates swept nearly every contested seat, communist authorities in Poland found themselves negotiating the terms of their own political eclipse. The transition, remarkably peaceful, became the template for the wave of revolutions that swept Eastern Europe later that year.
By early July 1989, Poland's Communist Party was reeling. Weeks earlier, in the country's first partially free elections since World War II, Solidarity-backed candidates had won 99 of 100 contested Senate seats and every open seat in the lower house, a result so lopsided that even the party's own strategists hadn't fully anticipated the scale of rejection.
Throughout early July, backroom negotiations intensified over how to form a government under the terms of the Round Table Agreement struck earlier that year. General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the communist head of state, faced the awkward task of trying to preserve some semblance of authority while acknowledging that his party's mandate had evaporated.
Within two months, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Solidarity activist and journalist, would be sworn in as prime minister — the first non-communist to lead a Warsaw Pact government since the早 1940s. Poland's peaceful, negotiated transition became the opening act of 1989's extraordinary chain reaction, inspiring protest movements from East Germany to Czechoslovakia to Romania before the year was out.
Key people: Lech Wałęsa, Tadeusz Mazowiecki