Karol Wojtyla's election in October 1978 broke a run of Italian popes stretching back to 1522, and his background as archbishop of Krakow in communist Poland gave his pontificate an immediate political weight few observers had anticipated. His first papal visit home to Poland in June 1979 drew crowds in the millions and is widely regarded by historians as a turning point, a mass, peaceful demonstration of religious feeling and national identity that the communist government could neither prevent nor control, and which is credited with helping to embolden the independent trade union movement Solidarity that emerged the following year under Lech Walesa.
John Paul II supported Solidarity through diplomatic channels and public statements throughout the 1980s even as Poland's government imposed martial law to suppress it, and historians and participants on both sides of the Cold War, including Mikhail Gorbachev himself, later described the pope's moral and political influence as a significant factor in the peaceful collapse of communist rule across Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991, though the collapse also had many other causes, economic, political, and internal to the Soviet system itself, that historians weigh differently against his personal contribution.
Beyond Europe, John Paul II redefined the scale of the papal office itself through travel, visiting well over a hundred countries across his 27 year pontificate, more than all his predecessors combined, and using those visits deliberately to engage young people, other faiths, and countries where Catholicism was a small minority, a pattern that made him, by the time of his death in 2005, one of the most widely seen human beings in history.