Rafał Trzaskowski: A New Hope

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.

In 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 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 European Parliament. European episode lasted less than 4 years. In the autumn of 2013 Trzaskowski was appointed Minister of Administration and Digitization in Donald Tusk’s cabinet. As a result, he resigned his mandate as a MEP.

Later, in the new government of Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz, he took the position of Secretary of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs responsible for European affairs in September 2014.

In 2015 he ran in the parliamentary elections as the leader of the PO list in the Krakow district. In the Sejm, he became vice-chairman of the Commission for European Union Affairs.

In November 2017, Trzaskowski was presented as the joint candidate of the Civic Platform and the Nowoczesna party for mayor of Warsaw in the 2018 local elections. In the October 2018 vote, he won in the first round with 56.67% of the vote, outclassing the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) candidate Patryk Jaki (28.53%).

Trzaskowski’s activities as mayor of Warsaw, however, have not brought him only laurels. The first controversial decision was the signing of the LGBT+ Declaration at the beginning of 2019, assuming the implementation in the capital city of the demands of this community in the areas of security, education, culture and sports, labor and administration, the patronage of the Mayor of Warsaw over the Parade of Equality, the introduction of anti-discrimination and sexual education in line with WHO standards or the appointment of a presidential plenipotentiary for LGBT+ communities. This document has been criticized by some political, non-governmental, and media circles, especially those of a Catholic, conservative, and right-wing profile, as well as the Polish Bishops’ Conference and the Ombudsman for Children.

The new mayor was also held responsible for failures at the

POLITICAL ACTIVITY ON A GRAND SCALE BEGAN WHEN IN 2009, FROM THE PO LIST IN THE WARSAW DISTRICT, HE BECAME A MEMBER OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

city’s main sewage treatment plant “Czajka”, which resulted in hundreds of tons of toxic substances flowing into the Vistula River. Trzaskowski tried to explain that the “Czajka” issue has been going on for many years and during his term of office the repair program is being intensively continued, but for the ruling right wing the sewage issue was and remains one of the main methods of attack on him.

Despite the problems in the capital, it was time to fight for the highest stakes in 2020. On May 15, after the prior resignation of opposition Civic Coalition candidate Małgorzata Kidawa-Błońska, Trzaskowski was presented as a candidate in the presidential election. His campaign slogan was Strong president, common Poland.

In the first round of voting, Trzaskowski came in second with 30.46% of the vote, entering the second round along with Andrzej Duda, who was seeking re-election (43.50% of the vote).

In the second round, he received 48.97% of the vote.