WARSAW, Feb 12: Polish icon Lech Walesa has cancelled a visit to Venezuela after President Hugo Chavez said the Solidarity veteran could be banned.

“This behaviour is not very mature and insults a Polish citizen,” Piotr Gulczynski, a spokesman for Walesa, said on Thursday.

Walesa, an anti-communist former labour leader and 1983 Nobel Peace prize winner, was scheduled to arrive on Friday for a five-day trip, during which he was to have met students and members of non-governmental organisations.

Walesa has quite often branded Chavez as a “demagogue” and a “populist”. He planned to visit Venezuela in November, but authorities persuaded him not to do so on security grounds.

On Tuesday, just days ahead of a Sunday referendum on amending the constitution to allow the leftist Chavez to seek re-election indefinitely, the Venezuelan president slammed Walesa, a 1980’s anti-communist icon.

“The statements of this idol with clay feet are very suspicious,” he added.

Walesa acquired worldwide recognition as the leader of the Solidarity labour union, which negotiated an entirely peaceful and bloodless end to communism in Poland in 1989. He served as Poland’s first democratically-elected post-WWII president from 1990 to 1995.—AFP