Paranoid Expansionism (former USSR) ..
The former president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, is staging a political comeback in his homeland Poland. Tusk is taking over as leader of the main opposition party, the liberal Civic Platform. He wants to challenge Jarosław Kaczyński of the ruling right wing Law and Justice party, in elections in two years' time. The government has clashed with Brussels over law reforms, and LGBTQ and women's rights.
Donald Franciszek Tusk ((
listen); born 22 April 1957) is a Polish politician who was
President of the European Council from
2014 to 2019. He served as the
14th prime minister of Poland from
2007 to 2014 and was a co-founder and chairman of the
Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska) political party. On 20 November 2019, Tusk was elected as the president of the
European People's Party (EPP), Europe's largest
transnational political party.
Tusk has been involved in Polish politics since the early 1990s, having founded several political parties and held elected office almost continuously since 1991. Tusk was one of the co-founders of the
free-market-orientated
Liberal Democratic Congress party. He entered the
Sejm (lower chamber of Poland's parliament) in 1991, but lost his seat in the 1993 election which went badly for the Congress.
In 1994, the Congress merged with the
Democratic Union to form the
Freedom Union. In 1997, Tusk was elected to the
Senate, and became its
deputy speaker. In 2001, he co-founded another
centre-right liberal conservative party,
Civic Platform (PO), and he was again elected to the Sejm, and became its
deputy speaker.
He was elected prime minister in 2007 and with his party's victory in the
2011 Polish parliamentary election, he became the first Prime Minister to be re-elected since the
fall of communism in Poland. In 2014, he became
president of the European Council and was re-elected to this position in 2017. He resigned as Polish prime minister to take the role, having been the longest-serving Prime Minister of the
Third Polish Republic and the third longest-serving Prime Minister of Poland after
Józef Cyrankiewicz and
Piotr Jaroszewicz.
Jarosław Aleksander Kaczyński ((
listen); born 18 June 1949) is a Polish
politician who is currently serving as leader of the
Law and Justice party (known by its Polish acronym PiS), which he co-founded in 2001 with his twin brother,
Lech Kaczyński, who served as president of Poland until
his death in 2010.
Running for PiS, he served as the
prime minister of Poland from July 2006 to November 2007, while his brother was the president of Poland. After PiS's
electoral defeat in 2007, Kaczyński was the main leader of the opposition during
Civic Platform's governments. Following the death of his brother in a
plane crash, Jarosław Kaczyński ran in the
2010 Polish presidential election losing to
Bronisław Komorowski.
Since the 2015 victories of PiS, both in the
presidential and
parliamentary election, Kaczyński is considered to be the most important politician in Poland and one of the most influential European leaders. For this reason, in Poland he is called by some people the "
Chief of State" (following the example of
Józef Piłsudski). In 2020, he was designated as the
Deputy Prime Minister of Poland with oversight over the defense, justice and interior ministries.
