Released from custody, he continued his activism and was prominent in the establishment of the Round Table Agreement that led to the semi-free 1989 Polish legislative election and a Solidarity-led government.

[9] From early in his career, Wałęsa was interested in workers' concerns; in 1968 he encouraged shipyard colleagues to boycott official rallies that condemned recent student strikes.

[10] In June 1976, Wałęsa lost his job at the Gdańsk Shipyard because of his continued involvement in illegal unions, strikes, and a campaign to commemorate the victims of the 1970 protests.

[2] Wałęsa worked closely with the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR), a group that emerged to lend aid to people arrested after the 1976 labor strikes and to their families.

[2][10] On 10 March 1981, through the introduction of his former superior in the army, Wałęsa met Wojciech Jaruzelski for the first time in the office building of the Council of Ministers for three hours.

Jaruzelski informed Wałęsa of the coming war games of the Warsaw Pact from 16 to 25 March, hoping he could help maintain the social order and avoid anti-Soviet remarks.

[2] Wałęsa and many other Solidarity leaders and activists were arrested; he was incarcerated for 11 months until 14 November 1982 at Chylice, Otwock, and Arłamów; eastern towns near the Soviet border.

[2][14][22][23] In December 1988, Wałęsa co-founded the Solidarity Citizens' Committee;[12] this was ostensibly an advisory body but in practice a political party that won the parliamentary elections in June 1989.

[14][28] Wałęsa has been criticized for a confrontational style and for instigating "war at the top", whereby former Solidarity allies clashed with one another, causing annual changes of government.

[40] Wałęsa developed a portfolio of three lectures ("The Impact of an Expanded NATO on Global Security", "Democracy: The Never-Ending Battle" and "Solidarity: The New Millennium"), and reads them at universities and public events with an appearance fee of around £50,000 ($70,000).

[41][42][43] In 1995, he founded the Lech Wałęsa Institute,[44] a think tank with a mission "to popularize the achievements of Polish Solidarity, educate young generations, promote democracy, and build civil society in Poland and around the world".

[51] Wałęsa and his supporters argued the so-called transparency legislation advocated by the government might turn into a witch hunt and the more than 500,000 Poles who had possibly collaborated with the Communist secret police could face exposure.

[53] Referring to Robert Biedroń, he argued that, considering they represent less than one percent of Polish society, homosexual MPs should sit "in the last row of the parliament, or even behind its walls".

After sharp international criticism, including the San Francisco Board of Supervisors's decision to rename Walesa Street as a result of these remarks, Wałęsa apologized for his comments, stressing that "being a man of old date, in my view one's sexual orientation should lie in one's intimate sphere".

[60] In 2014, in a widely publicized interview, Wałęsa expressed his disappointment in another Nobel laureate, US president Barack Obama: he told CNN, "When he was elected there was great hope in the world.

[64] In October 2024, Wałęsa described a victory by Donald Trump in the 2024 US presidential election as a "misfortune" both for the United States and the world, without providing further explanation.

[66] In his 2002 book titled The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, British historian Timothy Garton Ash writes that Wałęsa, while vehemently denying being a regular Security Service informer, admitted that he had "signed something" under interrogation in the 1970s.

[69][70] On 12 August 2000, Wałęsa, who was running a presidential campaign at the time, was cleared by the special Lustration Court of charges that he collaborated with the Communist-era secret services and reported on the activities of his fellow shipyard workers, due to the lack of evidence.

[71] Anti-Communists Piotr Naimski, one of the first members of the Workers' Defense Committee that led to the Solidarity trade union, and Antoni Macierewicz, Wałęsa's former Interior Minister, testified against him in the closed vetting trial.

Naimski, who said he testified with a "heavy heart", expressed his disappointment that Wałęsa "made a mistake by not going openly to the public, and he has missed an important chance".

[71] In June that year, he helped Antoni Macierewicz prepare a list of 64 members of the government and parliament who were named as spies in the police records; these included Wałęsa, then the Polish president.

[71] Despite helping Wałęsa in 2005 to receive the official status of a "victim of communist regime" from the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN),[73] this court ruling did not convince many Poles.

[80][81] The book's authors argue that Wałęsa, working under the code name Bolek,[d] was a secret police informant from 1970 (after being released from jail) until 1976 (before he was fired from the shipyard).

[87] The authors also claim that during his 1990–1995 presidency, Wałęsa used his office to destroy the evidence of his collaboration with the secret police by removing incriminating documents from the archives.

[89] On 18 February 2016, the government-affiliated INR in Warsaw announced it had seized a package of original documents that allegedly proved Wałęsa was a paid Security Service informant.

[93][94] The second is a "work file" which contains 279 pages of documents, including numerous reports by Bolek on his co-workers at Gdańsk Shipyard, and notes by Security Service officers from meetings with him.

[94] On 16 February 2016, about three months after Kiszczak's death, his widow Maria approached the Institute of National Remembrance and offered to sell the documents to the archives for 90,000 zlotys ($23,000).

[106] After the accusations against him resurfaced with the discovery of the Kiszczak dossier on 16 February 2016, Wałęsa called the files "lies, slander and forgeries",[108] and said he "never took money and never made any spoken or written report on anyone".

[45] In 1993, the heraldic authority of the Kingdom of Sweden assigned Wałęsa a personal coat of arms on the occasion of his admittance into the Royal Order of the Seraphim.

[132] Although the movie was never made, this payment sparked controversy in Poland when five years later it emerged that Wałęsa concealed this income to avoid paying taxes on it.