Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk, 66, is the new prime minister of Poland. He was previously prime minister twice, from 2007 to 2014 and president of the European Council for two terms from 2014 to 2019. He is from Gdansk, a city overlooking the Baltic. He is a son of the people: his father was a carpenter, his mother a nurse. Both had been slave laborers during the Nazi occupation. Furthermore, Tusk is part of an ethnic minority: he is a Kashubian, member of a community that has its own language, distinct from Polish, and which descends directly from the ancient Slavic tribe of the Pomeranians.
Tusk, who was a decent footballer in his youth, studied history at the University of Gdańsk, where he became an anti-communist student leader already in the 1970s. He started getting involved in politics at a young age. Donald Tusk joined Solidarity in his youth, becoming one of its most prominent young intellectuals. In 1981, after the imposition of martial law in Poland, he became a chimney painter, co-founding a cooperative, an experience that made him mature in his adherence to classical liberalism and develop an admiration for capitalism, in particular for how it Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan declined.
He entered Parliament in 1991, and then became prime minister in 2007, profitably managing EU funds and implementing strongly pro-business and pro-EU policies. In 2011 he formed his second government, which had a troubled life: in 2014 he was elected president of the European Council, succeeding the Belgian Herman van Rompuy. Criticized at the beginning of his mandate for his uncertain English, he quickly improved it, taking lessons and becoming able to speak it very well. In 2019, on the occasion of the Romanian presidency, he gave a speech in Bucharest entirely in Romanian, which was applauded for a long time by those present. Tusk, after two mandates at the head of the European Council, was president of the European People's Party, finally returning to Poland to challenge the Pis.
#Donald #Tusk #Polish #prime #minister