RAFAŁ TRZASKOWSKI: A NEW HOPE
When in summer 2020 Rafal Trzaskowski got support of more than 10 million Poles in second round of presidential election, minimally losing to Andrzej Duda, many opposition’s sympathizers saw him as a future leader. The return of Donald Tusk has changed this situation, but it is certain that he will play a very important role in the fight for Civic Platform’s return to the helm of government.
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n the last days of August, Trzaskowski launched his new project Campus Poland of the Future. “It is a space for dialogue and meetings created for active, young people who want to have an impact on the future of their country,” was one of the slogans of the meeting, during which more than 1,000 young Poles debated about the future for several days, meeting with politicians, economists or social activists. “We all have free will, we are proud people and we want to influence the reality. We don’t want anyone to limit our rights. We want to decide about ourselves, what values we hold, who
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we are friends with, what we want to learn, what Poland should look like,” Trzaskowski said at the opening of the event. In opinion polls, the current vice-leader of the Civic Platform and mayor of Warsaw has for years enjoyed the greatest trust among the young electorate. No wonder then that his political activity is to a large extent aimed at people just entering adulthood. It is hard to say, however, whether the change connected with Tusk’s return to the Polish political scene will not negatively influence the position of the ambitious young politician. For the time being, both of them are outdoing each other in mutual compliments (their debate was the first point of the Future Poland Campus), but political scientists do not exclude that their relationship in the coming years will rather resemble the famous “rough friendship”, which was supposed to link the leftist president Aleksander Kwasniewski with the leftist prime minister Leszek Miller at the turn of the 20th and 21st century. The 49-year-old Trzaskowski graduated in international relations from the Faculty of Journalism and Political Science at Warsaw University (1996). He also completed English philology studies at the Faculty of Neophilology of the University of Warsaw (1996) and European studies at the College of Europe in Natolin (1997). He was a scholarship holder at Oxford University (1995) and the Paris Institute for European Union Security Studies (2002). In 2004 he received a doctoral degree in political science at the Faculty of Journalism and Political Science of the University of Warsaw on the basis of the thesis titled: Dynamics of institutional reform in the European Union. Trzaskowski, which is rare among Polish politicians, is fluent in five languages - English, French, Spanish, Russian and Italian. Political activity on a grand scale began when in 2009, from the PO list in the Warsaw district, he became a member of The Warsaw Voice
