Andrzej Zbigniew Lepper (13 June 1954 – 5 August 2011) was a Polish politician, farmer, and trade unionist who led the Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland, an agrarian populist party that, between 2005 and 2007, was the third-largest political party in Poland; in 2006, he briefly formed a coalition government alongside the ruling Law and Justice party, serving in the roles of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture. He also served as Deputy Marshal of the Sejm in 2001 and from 2005 to 2006.
Considered a far-leftist, Lepper was heavily critical of capitalism and heavily integrated Catholic social teaching into his rhetoric; he thought positively of the Polish People's Republic. He led numerous farmers' protests; his supporters were known to frequently block roads. First rising to political notability in the early 1990s following his establishment of Self-Defence in 1992, he was elected to first political office, a seat in the West Pomeranian Voivodeship Sejmik, in 1998, being elected to the Sejm in 2001 and later removed from office in 2007. During this time, he ran for the office of President four times, in 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010.
After he was unelected, Lepper lost much of his political prominence and fell into large debts, ultimately being found hanged in his office in 2011. Although it was ruled a suicide, it has been speculated to be a murder, although there is no common agreement regarding a perpetrator. During and after his career, he was compared to figures such as Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales.
Early life Lepper was born in Stowięcino, a tiny hamlet of roughly 200 people. Formerly a thriving community, it became a place of socio-cultural impoverishment and economic struggle since Poland's transformation into a market-based economy. During this transition period his farm, like most small businesses in Poland, found itself on the verge of bankruptcy but survived.
A farmer by trade, Lepper completed all coursework required at the State Agricultural Technical School in Sypniewo, yet did not undertake the final qualifying exam. He also had no formal higher education but was presented with several doctor honoris causa awards, including by the University of Kyiv (Ukraine) in recognition of his work, commitment and outreach.
Lepper was married and, together with his wife Irena, had three children.
Political career For two years (1978–1980), he was a member of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), Poland's equivalent of a formal communist party during the Polish People's Republic (PRL; 1947–1989). In 1992 Lepper formed his own political party, an organisation of economically struggling farmers like himself, naming it Samoobrona (; SO).
The first time Lepper rose to a position of political leadership was in the summer of 1991, when he organised and led a farmer protest movement against the disastrous economic conditions in Polish agriculture and lack of state assistance to those impoverished by the ongoing capitalist transition. Already back then, Lepper was considering proposing an alternative economic system to the capitalist one. The voivodeships of Zamość and Koszalin became important centres of mobilisations around the issue of rural poverty and over-indebtedness. In Zamość, a protest committee was founded on 10 July, while on 27 July, the first iteration of Samoobrona, the Communal Agricultural Self-Defence Committee (), was founded in Lepper's home village of Darłowo.
Rural protests quickly spread and attracted the attention and support of major rural trade unions, such as the Rural Solidarity. The regional president of Rural Solidarity in West Pomerania, Zbigniew Obrocki, coordinated protests together with the newly created movements and invited several representatives of the local protest committees in Zamość and Darłowo to join the Rural Solidarity's strike based on occupying the Sejm building on 5 October 1991. The representatives invited by Obrocki included Lepper, as a representative of the striking farmers of Darłowo. This action was considered very successful because of how much media coverage and support it gained, and soon divisions emerged between the representatives based on the protest methods. Rural Solidarity wanted to preserve their official and civil image by keeping to peaceful protests, while the group organised against Lepper insisted on more confrontational measures. As Gazeta Wyborcza reported on 11 October:
This difference of opinion led to the formation of the National Committee for the Self-Defence of Agriculture (, KKSR), which was an informal formation with no official leadership but came to be dominated by Lepper. Open clashes with police that took place during the protests of KKSR gained much attention and made the group considered one of the main representatives of protesting farmers. Because of this, Lepper was invited to a meeting with Leszek Balcerowicz on 24 October. Balcerowicz was the Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, whose name became synonymous with the neoliberal, monetarist and anti-social policies carried out in post-communist Poland. After a two-hour-long conversation, Lepper became convinced that the neoliberal reform pursued by Balcerowicz needed to be stopped at all costs.
As Lepper reported many years later, the idea to create a trade union and then a political movement was born after a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Leszek Balcerowicz. Lepper said about the meeting: "Everything that happened afterwards – with me and Samoobrona – I therefore owe, to some extent, to that conversation of 10 years ago". Lepper's disdain towards Balcerowicz became a key element of his political rhetoric – in 2002, he described Balcerowicz as "the greatest pest, destroyer, traitor".
Lepper's Farmers' Self-Defence Committee first attempted to participate in the 1991 Polish parliamentary election on 27 October. The electoral law for the Sejm and Senate in force at the time allowed committees to register in only one electoral district. His run in the elections was unsuccessful, due – as Lepper claimed – also to his lack of direct participation in the campaign. The list of the Provincial Farmers' Self-Defence Committee opened by the group's leader received only 3247 votes in constituency number 21, covering the then Koszalin and Słupsk voivodeships.
While Lepper failed to win a seat, the fact he received over 3000 votes for his name was seen as a demonstration that he could mobilise local networks of farmers in his favour. Because of this, the Provincial Farmers' Self-Defence Committee, under which Lepper organised an electoral list together with other farmers, was not scrapped but instead transformed into a trade union and then a political party. According to Lepper, as late as in the summer of 1991, the farmer protest committees in Darłowo and Zamość that would form Samoobrona were not planning to become a trade union. However, the autumn hunger strike in Warsaw, as well as Lepper's electoral bid in the 1991 elections, made protesting farmers supportive of the idea.
On 6 November 1991, Lepper's group organised a hunger strike, which came to be considered "spectacular". According to Sciences Po, the Lepper's hunger strike "established a link between the visible suffering of the strikers and the cause they endorsed". In January 1992, the Trade Union of Agriculture 'Samoobrona' was registered. The political party, which initially appeared under the name Self-Defence Alliance, was instead registered on 12 June 1992. Its membership – apart from representatives of ZZR "Samoobrona" – also included activists from the Metalworkers' Trade Union and a Green faction headed by Jan Bryczkowski.
On 14 November 1991, an agreement was concluded between the protesters and the government, which provided for a halt to the bailiff executions threatening farmers and the establishment of a special Fund for Restructuring and Debt Relief of Agriculture. In November of the same year, an application was made to the court to register the Trade Union of Agriculture 'Self-Defence'. The ZZR 'Samoobrona' – which brings together farmers and people connected with agriculture – was registered on 10 January 1992. Subsequently, on 27 and 28 March 1992, the First National Congress of the union was held in Warsaw, with representatives of the PSL, the National Union of Farmers and the then Deputy Minister of Agriculture, P. Dąbrowski, among others, attending it as invited guests. Lepper was elected president of the trade union, and a decision was taken to tighten up the forms of protest, setting up, among other things, so-called 'anti-enforcement brigades', which were to deal with thwarting bailiff seizures on indebted farms. Leszek Józef Walkiewicz reported that the 'anti-enforcement brigades' of Samoobrona saved more than 1,000 farmers from eviction.
Led by Lepper, the trade unionists consistently demanded the implementation of agreements concerning indebted farmers. They also decided to assert their interests through legal means, applying to the Constitutional Court to examine the compliance of the current banking law allowing variable interest rates on loans. In the absence of appropriate government action, a 100-strong group of trade unionists occupied the Ministry of Agriculture building on 9 April. After a few days, the protesters went on hunger strike, demanding talks with government representatives and at the same time adding to their previous demands for the resignation of Minister G. Janowski. Around 150 ZZR Samoobrona activists broke into the Ministry of Agriculture building in Warsaw and set up camp in one of the reception rooms on the first floor. The demonstrators' demands were the implementation of the November agreements, in particular with regard to halting the seizure of the assets of over-indebted farmers; the introduction of agricultural loans at preferential rates, 12% maximum; and a meeting with the Prime Minister.
Lepper organised anti-government demonstrations and other actions, most significantly against the politics of the Suchocka and Buzek governments, both characterised by growing social and socio-economic injustice, especially experienced in the Polish countryside.
Lepper quickly attracted the interests of the media and politicians, as well as the courts. His party gained notoriety through road blockades, protests and spilling imported grain from trains to protest against the declining prices of agricultural products. While this forced Lepper to endure several arrests and lawsuits, it also allowed him to build a reputation as a defender of the common people.
As a party leader, he challenged Aleksander Kwaśniewski in the 1995 presidential election, receiving 1.3% of the vote. In 2000, Samoobrona organised campaigns blocking major roads to bring public and mass media attention to the growing impoverishment of Polish agriculture. Lepper won 3.05% of the vote in the 2000 presidential election. In the 2001 parliamentary election, Lepper's party entered the lower chamber of the Polish Parliament (Sejm). Lepper was elected from the Koszalin constituency.
Lepper's party received 11.4% of the vote and 56 seats in the September 2005 parliamentary election, making it the third biggest party in the Sejm. Andrzej Lepper stood in the October 2005 presidential election as the party's candidate and received 15% of the vote, the third-highest result.
After the SLD-PSL government collapsed, Lepper and the Samoobrona were growing increasingly supportive of the emerging Law and Justice party. The electoral collapse of the SLD, which as a fellow left-wing party was now the main competitor of Samoobrona, caused Lepper's party to become the most popular party in Poland, according to the 2004 polls. However, the polls gradually stabilised, and by the time of the 2004 European Parliament election in Poland, Samoobrona only won the amount of support it had in 2001.