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.
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.
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 (lit. 'self-defence'; 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 (Polish: Gminny Komitet Samoobrony Rolnictwa), 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:
We came here [in front of Sejm] to discuss agricultural problems, not to demand anything. We don't want to organize a revolt, the peasants aren't going to demonstrate with pitchforks!", [Protest Committee leaders] told journalists at a press conference held yesterday [October 10, 1990]. Nevertheless, profound differences between the demonstrators became apparent at the press conference. Some of them, mainly from the Koszalin voivodeship (where a protest committee has been active since July), publicly stated that they did not believe in the effectiveness of these peaceful methods: "The government will only give in when there is bloodshed and dead bodies. The only solution is to show them our strength and invade the city". It was in an electric atmosphere that the press conference ended, without the protest committee being able to specify how long it will be prepared to wait for the government to enter into negotiations.
This difference of opinion led to the formation of the National Committee for the Self-Defence of Agriculture (Polish: Krajowy Komitet Samoobrony Rolnictwa, 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.