Former Polish president and retired politician Lech Wałęsa flew in from Warsaw via Hong Kong on Tuesday night for a series of speaking engagements in the country.
Two Polish businessmen and politicians, Tomasz Turkowski and Jan Litynski, accompanied him.
Asked what he intends to do while in Manila, Wałęsa spoke through an interpreter: “I am not planning to be president of the Philippines. Our era is over. I come because I was invited,” he said, laughing at his own joke.
Wałęsa fancied a media statement that his life and that of former President Corazon Aquino seems to run parallel because he caused the downfall of communism in Poland, and Aquino drove away a strongman to eventually become the country’s president.
He said: “All my life, I tried to rule from the heart, but we have different situations. I gave everything from what I am feeling, but others do it through talking all the time.”
Wałęsa, the former head of Solidarity, Poland’s worker’s union, followed in the footsteps of the Philippines’s People’s Power Revolution and toppled the Polish communist regime.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, and served as president of Poland from 1990 to 1995.
Wałęsa added, however, that since he ruled Poland decades ago, Europe has become the European Union with a single currency, but still, there is no unity among them.
“There is globalization and the world has plenty of chance to do it right, but still leaders make wrong decisions. That is because each country has different history, different religion and different fundamentals,” he said.
Wałęsa, 75, said he is old and does not travel often.
He often wipes his eyes with a white handkerchief because of the continued flow of what looked like tears. He seems impatient waiting for his two companions who were tied up at the immigration and at the arrival area waiting for their luggage.
Wałęsa has a diplomatic passport and breezed through the airport formalities. He is scheduled to have a news conference at the Peninsula Hotel.