LEGISLATORS voted yesterday to grant Mr Lech Walesa a pension as ex president of Poland, paving the way for him to give up his old $250 a month shipyard electrician's job which he pointedly resumed last week.
The lower house of parliament voted by to 32, with 63 abstentions, to grant lifetime pensions to Mr Walesa, the former communist leader, Gen Wojciech Jaruzelski and the last Polish president in London ex Mr Ryszard Kaczorowski.
The net pension of each ex-president will be about £1,600 a month - the same as the current president's basic pay.
Mr Walesa (52) returned on April 2nd to register for the job at the Gdansk shipyard here in 1980 he launched Solidarity, the Soviet bloc's first free trade union which, went on to topple communist rule in 1989.
He said he was doing so because parliament, dominated by his leftist foes, was dragging its feet over giving him a pension for his five year term, which ended with detent by the former communist Mr Aleksander Kwasniewski in last November's elections.
In a debate last Monday, opposition depuities were divided over whether Gen Jaruzelski should get the same privileges as Mr Walesa, Poland's first fully democratically elected president since the second World War.
Opposition deputies argued that Gen Jaruzelski, who imposed martial law in, 1981 to crush Solidarity and held the presidency briefly during the transition to full democracy after 1989 without being popularly elected, did not deserve the pension.
Mr Walesa has hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets. But tax authorities have been pressing him to pay heavy back taxes on $1 million he received in 1989 from a US film studio, which Mr Walesa says he is not liable to pay.
Mr Walesa has been on a lecture tour of the United States this week, raising finds, for an institute that he created to help the fragmented centre right parties descended from Solidarity to rally for a comeback in 1997 parliamentary polls.
The Nobel prize winner has made clear that once the pension is approved, he will give up his shipyard job fixing electric trolleys to devote himself full time to politics.
The pension has yet to be approved by the Senate and signed by Mr Kwasniewski.