Intro:

UEFA President Michel Platini visited the Solidarity Centre Foundation in Gdansk, Poland on Friday afternoon.

Script:

UEFA President Michel Platini was in Gdansk on Friday for the UEFA European Championship quarter-final between Germany and Greece.

Before the match he took the opportunity to visit the Solidarity Centre Foundation in the city.

Solidarity was an independent labour union which was set up in 1980 and played an important role in bringing down communist rule in Poland.

It then became a political party and contested elections in 1989, one of its representatives, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, becoming Poland's first non-Communist Prime Minister since 1945.

The Solidarity movement began when workers in the local shipyard in Gdansk held a strike and made twenty-one demands including: independent trade unions to be legalised, the right to strike, an end to media censorship and improvements to the health service.

It sparked a wave of strikes throughout Poland, and on September 3rd Poland's Soviet government made a deal with the Solidarity movement, which was led by an electrician called Lech Walesa, known as the Gdansk Agreement.

Walesa went on to become President of Poland in 1990.

Platini finished his afternoon tour of Gdansk by visiting the building where the Gdansk Agreement was signed and wrote in the visitors book.