President hails Polish 1989 vote as ‘triumph that changed the world’
PR dla Zagranicy
Paweł Kononczuk
04.06.2019 13:27
Landmark elections in 1989 which signalled the end of Poland’s communist dictatorship were "a great triumph that changed the world," President Andrzej Duda said on Tuesday.
Photo: candelabra/pixabay/CC0 Creative Commons
He was speaking at a special session of the upper house of parliament held to mark 30 years since Poland’s first partially-free elections after World War II.
The president said the Polish vote on June 4, 1989 triggered a seismic shift that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union.
The Solidarity pro-democracy movement scored a resounding victory in the election, winning all the seats available to it in the lower house of Poland’s parliament and all but one seat in the freely contested Senate, the upper chamber.
The vote precipitated a domino effect across the region and in November 1989 culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had stood for decades as a symbol of division between Western Europe and the communist East.
(pk/gs)
Source: PAP