Ludwik Dorn

Ludwik Dorn in the Sejm (2014)

Ludwik Stanisław Dorn (born June 5, 1954 in Warsaw ) is a Polish politician , sociologist and publicist and from April 27 to November 4, 2007 as President of the Polish Parliament ( Sejmmarschall ). Dorn is a co-founder of the Law and Justice party ; from 2005 to 2007 he was Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior and Administration in the governments of Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz and Jarosław Kaczyński .

Origin and childhood

Ludwik Dorn's father Henryk Dorn, who used to be called Dornbaum, came from a rich assimilated Jewish family from Tarnopol in what was then eastern Poland , now Ukraine . Before the Second World War , the Dornbaum family owned two of the three optics stores in Tarnopol. The grandfather Ludwik Dorns wanted his son Henryk to take over the workshops and therefore sent him to an optics course and a watchmaker course in Jena , the German center of the optical industry.

Before the Second World War, Henryk Dorn was a master watchmaker in Warsaw - Mokotów . He belonged to the Communist Party of Western Ukraine and the Polish Communist Party (KPP). He was serving a prison sentence for communist agitation prior to the war. Henryk Dorn's entire family was murdered in the course of the Holocaust . Henryk himself fled to Kazakhstan when the Germans had already invaded Poland. From the USSR he returned to Poland together with the army under the command of Zygmunt Berling .

After the war Henryk Dorn was a member of the communist parties Polish Workers 'Party and Polish United Workers' Party and initially lecturer in Marxism-Leninism at the Technical University of Warsaw . After leaving university in 1956, he worked as an optician in Warsaw and opened an optics shop on Marszałkowska Street , next to the then Życie Warszawy newspaper building . Henryk Dorn died in 1982. Ludwik's mother, a well-known Warsaw neurologist , was a more left-wing democrat.

Since his father was not a believer, Ludwik Dorn was not baptized as a child , but brought up in the tradition of agnosticism . Ludwik Dorn had good grades in mathematics in elementary school , he was the winner of a mathematics Olympiad. At the end of the 1970s he attended the VI. General education Tadeusz Reytan High School in Warsaw.

Youth and Studies

The boy scout movement, more precisely the 1st Warsaw Romuald Traugutt group, called Black One (Polish: Czarna Jedynka ) , had a major influence on the worldview of the young Ludwik Dorn . After graduating from high school, Ludwik Dorn began studying sociology at the Institute for Social Sciences at Warsaw University .

After the unrest in June 1976, he became involved in helping the workers persecuted by the regime in July 1976 and began to participate in the Committee for the Defense of Workers (Polish: Komitet Obrony Robotników - KOR ). From 1977 onwards he worked as an editor for the underground monthly newspaper Głos . In 1978 he finished his sociology studies and received his master's degree in social sciences.

Opposition activity

The August 1980 spent thorn in prison on Rakowiecka road . The striking workers demanded the release of all imprisoned opposition members, and Dorn was released. From September 1980 he was a member of the Solidarność trade union and the Freedom - Justice - Independence movement (Polish: Wolność - Sprawiedliwość - Niepodległość ). He then taught and worked as a sociologist at the Center for Social Sciences of the independent trade union Solidarity in the Mazovian regional association.

After the imposition of martial law in Poland on 13 December 1981 sent by profile sought and hid half years in Gdansk and Warsaw. In 1982 his father Henryk Dorn died. The mother did not inform her son about the funeral so as not to endanger him. Ludwik Dorn headed the editorial offices of the underground newspapers Głos (German: "The Voice") and Wiadomości (German: Nachrichten ) and organized the Center for Documentation and Analysis (Polish: Centrum Dokumentacji i Analiz ).

In the autumn of 1983, the future Prime Minister Jan Olszewski helped him establish initial contacts and talks with the Polish communist leadership. Ludwik Dorn signed a declaration of commitment in which he declared that he would not question the legal principles of the Communist People's Republic. State television showed this document in its program entitled The End of the Underground . The broadcast sparked a great deal of controversy and great uncertainty among the opposition; many saw it as an ingratiation to the communist regime. In 1983, Dorn published the manifesto The Reconstruction of the State in his newspaper Głos , in which he called for solidarity , the Catholic Church and the army to join forces against the communist rulers.

In the 1980s he kept himself up with translations of English espionage novels under the pseudonym Dorota Lutecka. B. by John le Carré over water. Dorn also wrote children's books. Ludwik Dorn was an opponent of the round table agreements in which the Polish opposition reached a compromise with the communist Polish leadership in 1989, which ultimately led to the transfer of power to the democratic opposition.

Porozumienie Centrum

From 1990, Dorn began to work more closely with Jarosław Kaczyński , who founded the right-wing Catholic party Porozumienie Centrum and supported Lech Walesa's candidacy in the 1990 presidential elections . After Wałęsa's election victory, Dorn became head of the analysis department in the presidential office . His departure from the presidential office took place after conflicts and disagreements between the brothers Jarosław and Lech Kaczyński with Lech Wałęsa.

From 1992, Dorn was deputy chairman of Porozumienie Centrum . When Lech Kaczyński ran for the office of President in 1995, Dorn was his press spokesman. In the parliamentary elections in 1997 , Dorn - as a member of the PC party - was elected to the Sejm on the list of the Akcja Wyborcza Solidarność electoral alliance . In protest against measures by the coalition government between AWS and the liberal Unia Wolności led by Hanna Suchocka , he resigned from the AWS parliamentary group and became a non-attached MP.

Law and justice

In 2001 he took part in the founding of the national conservative party Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (short form: PiS German: Law and Justice ) together with Jarosław and Lech Kaczyński and was elected vice chairman of this party. In the 2001 parliamentary elections, he was elected to the Sejm as a candidate from the Warsaw-Land constituency. Since December 2002 he has been the leader of the PiS faction in parliament. In the parliamentary elections in 2005 , he was re-elected from the Warsaw-Land constituency for the PiS.

On October 31, 2005, he was appointed Minister of the Interior and Administration in the Minority Cabinet of Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz (PiS). On November 21, 2005 he was also appointed Polish Deputy Prime Minister.

On February 6, 2007 Ludwik Dorn announced to Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński his resignation as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior. The prime minister accepted the resignation of the minister, but left Dorn in the office of deputy prime minister. He informed him about this on February 7, 2007. The reason for his resignation was given by Dorn's disagreement with Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński on an important matter relating to the functioning of the ministry. On February 8, 2007, Janusz Kaczmarek , the previous attorney general, succeeded Dorn in the office of interior minister. Dorn became Deputy Prime Minister with no portfolio. On April 27, 2007 he was elected President of Parliament to succeed Marek Jurek (PiS).

In the 2007 parliamentary elections , he again won a seat in the Sejm with 81,696 votes.

On November 5, 2007, he resigned from his position as deputy chairman of the PiS after publicly speaking out against the policies of Jarosław Kaczyński. On November 15, 2007, Dorn's membership rights in the PiS were suspended and party disciplinary proceedings were initiated against him.

On October 21, 2008, Dorn was expelled from the PiS party and Sejm faction. 34 of 37 members of the state executive voted for the exclusion, which was justified by the chairman of the state council of the party, Joachim Brudziński , by saying that Dorn had given press interviews in which "the party leadership and even the person of the chairman himself was disavowed".

"Polska Plus" party

In October 2009 Dorn became chairman of the newly founded parliamentary group “Polska Plus” (Poland Plus), in January 2010 a member of the presidium of the party of the same name, which mainly consisted of the dissidents of the “Law and Justice” party. In March 2010, he agreed to run in the 2010 presidential elections, but after the plane disaster in Smolensk and the early election date, his party decided not to run. When “Polska Plus” supported Kaczyński's candidacy, Dorn withdrew from party activities, renounced party membership and supported Marek Jurek as a presidential candidate. A week later he resigned from the party and acted as an independent MP. In the 2011 elections he ran again for the PiS and was elected to the Sejm. After the elections he joined the Solidarna Polska faction , but left it again in 2014 and belonged to the Sejm as an independent member of parliament. In the 2015 elections, he ran on the Platforma Obywatelska list but was not elected to the Sejm.

Private life

Ludwik Dorn describes himself as a believer, he was baptized as an adult. He is the father of three daughters and is married to a third marriage. Ludwik Dorn is interested in poetry aside from politics and deals with the translation of poems into Polish by, among others, John Keats and William Butler Yeats , he also writes fairy tales . One of them was awarded in the national competition Great Poets Writing for Children .

Ludwik Dorn is considered a stubborn politician. Once he was friends with the Kaczyński brothers and was considered the "third twin brother", then he got involved in conflicts with his employees because of a lack of willingness to compromise.

Web links

Commons : Ludwik Dorn  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biography Ludwik Dorns on wprost .pl
• Ludwik Dorn's homepage as a member of the Sejm (in Polish)

References

1. ↑ Dorn wyrzucony z PiS , gazeta.pl October 21, 2008  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Ludwik Dorn startuje z list PO. Retrieved December 19, 2015 (Polish).