WARSAW, Poland — Kornel Morawiecki, the father of Poland’s prime minister who was also the country’s most senior lawmaker and a leading dissident during the communist era, has died at 78.
Mr. Morawiecki died at a Warsaw government hospital Monday following a long illness.
His son, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, had cut short a campaign meeting Friday for the nation’s Oct. 13 parliamentary elections to be with his father, whose health had deteriorated rapidly.
The prime minister’s office confirmed the death.
Poland’s most powerful politician, ruling party head Jaroslaw Kaczynski, expressed “great sorrow” and called Mr. Morawiecki an “outstanding freedom activist” and “steadfast person.”
European Council President Donald Tusk, who was Poland’s premier from 2007 to 2014, tweeted words of sympathy to Mateusz Morawiecki, who is his political foe.
Kornel Morawiecki, who had the title of senior parliament speaker, recently had been awarded Poland’s highest distinction, the Order of the White Eagle, for decades of service to democratic Poland.
In the 1980s, he founded the Fighting Solidarity group, which fought against communist rule and opposed any negotiations or deals with the regime. The group was an uncompromising splinter off the nationwide pro-democracy Solidarity movement.
His son Mateusz, then a teenager, was an activist.
Mr. Morawiecki went into hiding after communist authorities imposed martial law to crack down on the pro-democracy movement in December 1981, and he was involved in clandestine printing of anti-communist brochures. He changed his hideouts 50 times before being caught in 1987 and imprisoned for months.
The communists then deported him. After a few months in Austria, Italy and the United States, he surreptitiously returned to Poland under an assumed name.
Black-and white footage on state TV showed the moment of his deportation: Mr. Morawiecki was seen refusing to climb the steps to the plane, and secret security plainclothes officers led him up by force.
Mr. Morawiecki was critical of Solidarity’s 1989 roundtable talks with the regime that peacefully ousted the communists from power. He described it as a deal that only marginally improved the communist system but failed to end it.
No funeral arrangements have been made public.
