Andrzej Duda
Andrzej Duda won an election nobody expected him to win, spent a decade signing the laws that put Poland at odds with the European courts, and ended it as a front-line ally in a European war. He was an administrative lawyer from Krakow, an academic and then a junior minister, and when he was nominated in 2015 he was so little known that his own side treated the campaign as a rehearsal. He won, and his party won the parliamentary election five months later with the first single-party majority since 1989. The programme that followed was a reconstruction of the judiciary: a new national council of the judiciary appointed by parliament, a disciplinary chamber for judges, a lowered retirement age that removed sitting members of the supreme court, and a constitutional tribunal staffed after a disputed appointment fight. The European Commission opened the first rule-of-law procedure ever used against a member state, the European courts ruled repeatedly against the measures, and billions in recovery funds were withheld. Duda vetoed two of the bills in 2017, which briefly suggested an independent presidency, then signed amended versions that achieved most of the same ends. He was re-elected in 2020 by four-tenths of a point in the closest contest since the fall of communism, after a campaign that attacked what he called an ideology of sexual minorities. The last three years were different in kind. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Poland became the corridor through which most Western weapons reached the Ukrainian army and the destination of several million refugees taken in by households rather than camps. Duda was among the first heads of state into Kyiv, pushed the alliance towards heavier commitments than several larger members wanted, and presided over a defence build-up aimed at the largest army in Europe. He left office in 2025 at the end of his second term.
- Lived: 1972 CE – ?
- Nationality: Polish
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
