Poles gives Duda the nod again

SECOND TERM: PRESIDENT IS LOYAL ‘PARTY MAN’

Head of state favours tightening already restrictive anti-abortion law.

Polish President Andrzej Duda, who won Sunday’s election, is a loyal ally of the ruling populists. A second five-year term for the 48-year-old lawyer will improve the governing right-wing Law and Justice (PIS) party’s chances of moving ahead with its agenda.

Duda has rarely said no to powerful PIS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and is known for waving through policies, including controversial judicial reforms.

“He’s a party man, carrying out its orders,” said Warsaw-based political analyst Stanislaw Mocek.

The only time Duda broke from the party was in 2017, when he vetoed two judicial reforms that he believed gave too much power to the attorney-general, who is also the justice minister.

The surprise veto left the PIS stunned and earned Duda applause from the liberal opposition and the European Union.

Born in 1972 to a family of professors in the southern city of Krakow, Duda was a choir boy and Boy Scout before earning a law degree from the Jagiellonian University in 1996.

When PIS first came to power in 2005, Duda was named deputy justice minister, a job he gave up in 2008 to become an aide to then president Lech Kaczynski, Jaroslaw’s twin.

A devout Catholic, Duda was close to Lech Kaczynski – who died in 2010 when his presidential jet crashed in Smolensk, Russia – and often calls himself his “spiritual heir”.

Duda also has the backing of the present-day incarnation of the Solidarity trade union that brought a peaceful end to communism at home in 1989.

He was elected to the Polish parliament in 2011 and the European parliament in 2014. But he only became well-known after Jaroslaw Kaczynski crowned him presidential candidate.

Duda went on to win the presidential election in May 2015, after promising voters social benefits galore.

Duda is in favour of tightening Poland’s anti-abortion law – already among Europe’s most restrictive – and recently likened “LGBT ideology” to communism, drawing criticism at home and abroad. – AFP

Picture: AFP VICTORY. Polish President Andrzej Duda, centre, after addressing supporters with his wife Agata, right, as exit poll results were announced during the presidential election in Pultusk on Sunday. Poland’s right-wing head of state, Duda won a second term in the presidential run-off against Warsaw’s liberal mayor.