Walesa Says He’ll Run for Polish Presidency : Solidarity: He hints the government is hurting the reform movement. The campaign could set up a fight with the prime minister, a former ally.

Solidarity leader Lech Walesa affirmed Monday that he will run for president of Poland and said the administration of Solidarity Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki has distorted some of the ideals of the movement.

In the first of a series of interviews to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the founding of Solidarity on Aug. 31, 1980, Walesa said he will seek to replace Wojciech Jaruzelski, the former Communist Party leader, as president, setting up a possible confrontation with Mazowiecki.

“I am the moral president now,” he declared, saying it was he who brokered the process last year that installed Jaruzelski and Mazowiecki, as well as putting his former advisers, Adam Michnik and Bronislaw Geremek, in prominent positions in Parliament.

“All of them were installed by me,” he said. “I gave them too much, and now I am being overthrown.”

Previously, Walesa had said he would run “if the circumstances required it.” Aides now say he will begin his campaign in earnest in September.

Jaruzelski’s presidential term expires in 1994, but he has suggested that he will step down next year because of the changing political circumstances.

However, Mazowiecki, a former Walesa adviser who openly split with the Solidarity leader last spring, and his supporters are reluctant to see the strong-willed union leader in a position that could influence the operations of the Parliament and the army as well as the government.

Walesa said that, when Solidarity was founded 10 years ago, he had two goals: to overthrow communism and to build a new political system.

“The first goal was achieved, and the second is being implemented,” he said. “I swore to achieve these goals. These are the reasons for my moral right to struggle for these reforms.”

When asked whether he felt Mazowiecki and his supporters had betrayed him, he said: “I will show these elements during the election campaign,” adding he would not give details now.

“The government of Mazowiecki needs to be needled, and I am doing it,” he said.

Walesa and Mazowiecki broke ranks over the pace of political reform and specifically over the continuing presence in the state bureaucracy of thousands of former Communist Party “apparatchiks,” who hold managerial jobs and block attempted reforms.

The split has not only divided Solidarity into two warring camps but threatens the administration’s tough economic stabilization plan, which has slashed inflation but brought unemployment close to the 1 million mark in this country of 39 million people.