GDANSK, Poland -- Poland elects a new Parliament on September 23 and, in the country where the triumph of people power over communism heralded the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the wheel of history has turned full circle. In 1989, when Poland's Communist rulers agreed to hold limited elections, they reserved two-thirds of the seats in Parliament for themselves. Candidates backed by the opposition solidarity movement swept the freely-contested constituencies. Twelve years on, the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), ex-communists restyled as Social Democrats, could come close to that result -- this time in fully free elections -- thanks to 50 percent opinion poll support. The solidarity bloc which has led Poland for the past four years could be wiped off the political map, punished by voters tired of change, soaring unemployment and reforms bungled by the sleaze-stricken government of Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek. But for Lech Walesa, former leader of the solidarity trade union and post-communist Poland's first freely elected president, it is no surprise that the movement which helped the West win the Cold War is finally politically imploding. "You have to understand the essence of solidarity: It was an action based on trial and error. Its main goal was to defeat communism," Walesa told Reuters in an interview. "But when we beat communism there was nobody to lead the country," said the Feisty former shipyard electrician who, now aged 57, is in political retirement. Some historians say that Walesa himself, as president from 1990 to 1995, ruined solidarity's chances of ever evolving from a mass movement into a strong Christian Democratic Party backed by the workers and intellectuals who rallied against communism. He defends his "war on the top", saying he had wanted to stop a new, more harmful, monopoly of power developing which could have derailed the transition to democracy. The result was election defeat to the left in 1993, which ruled in coalition with the peasants party. But in 1997 a coalition of right-wing parties united to pull off what could be the last victory in the name of solidarity.