Bronisław Komorowski

Bronisław Komorowski (born June 4, 1952, Oborniki Śląskie, Poland) is a Polish politician who served as president of Poland (2010–15). Named acting president after the death of Lech Kaczyński in April 2010, Komorowski won the presidency in a special election that July.

Komorowski was born to an aristocratic family, but the communist regime in postwar Poland created a challenging environment for members of the hereditary landowning class. His family moved frequently, relocating from near Wrocław to Poznań, before settling in Warsaw when Komorowski was a teenager. He became active in the anticommunist opposition while he was still a high school student, and his dissident activities led to his first arrest in 1971. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Warsaw University in 1977, and throughout the 1980s he taught at the Niepokalanów seminary near Warsaw. Komorowski also remained a committed dissident during this period, working as the editor of an underground publication.

With the fall of communism in 1989, Komorowski launched his political career, initially serving on the Council of Ministers before his election to the Sejm (parliament) in 1991. Over the following decade, he held a number of ministerial positions, including defense minister (2000–01) in the government of Jerzy Buzek. In 2001 he joined the centre-right Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska; PO), and in 2006 he was elected vice-chairman of that party. He continued his rise in the parliament, and in November 2007 he was elected speaker of the Sejm.

As speaker, Komorowski sponsored a number of pro-European Union and economic reform initiatives that brought him into conflict with the more Euroskeptic president, Kaczyński. When Kaczyński was killed, along with dozens of other prominent Poles, in a plane crash in April 2010, Komorowski was named acting president. Constitutionally obliged to call an election within two weeks of Kaczyński’s death, Komorowski announced that a first round of polling would occur on June 20, 2010, and that he would run as the Civic Platform candidate. In the event, Komorowski finished first—ahead of his most prominent opponent in the race, Kaczyński’s twin brother, Jarosław, who represented the conservative Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość; PiS) party. However, because neither candidate tallied at least 50 percent of the vote, a runoff election between them was held in July. In that contest Komorowski prevailed with 53 percent of the vote.

When he ran for reelection to the largely ceremonial office in May 2015, Komorowski again found himself facing a runoff election. This time he finished a close second (with some 34 percent of the total vote) to Andrzej Duda of PiS (who tallied about 35 percent) as independent candidate Paweł Kukiz, a popular actor and rock singer, proved to be the spoiler by surprisingly capturing some 21 percent of the vote with a protest campaign centred on electoral reform—specifically on replacing the system of voting for party lists with voting for winner-take-all single-seat constituencies. In the May 24 runoff election, Komorowski came up short, garnering 48.45 percent of the vote and losing the presidency to Duda, who captured 51.55 percent of the vote.