Rafał Trzaskowski

Rafał Trzaskowski (2020)

Rafał Kazimierz Trzaskowski [ ˈrafaw kaˈʑĩmʲjɛʃ tʂasˈkɔfski ] (born January 17, 1972 in Warsaw ) is a Polish politician of the Civic Platform (PO) and since 2018 mayor of Warsaw. Between 2013 and 2014 he was Minister for Administration and Digitization . Trzaskowski was elected PO candidate for the 2020 presidential election in Poland on May 15, 2020 . In the runoff election on July 12, he was defeated by incumbent Andrzej Duda , who was supported by the national conservative party Law and Justice and is close to it.

Life and work

Trzaskowski speaks as State Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before the Polish Senate (2014)

Trzaskowski visited the Mikołaj-Rej-Liceum in Warsaw and was active during the parliamentary elections in Poland in 1989 as a volunteer for the Citizens' Committee of Solidarity . After the fall of the Wall in 1989 , he stayed in the USA for a student exchange . After graduating from high school in 1991, he studied political science and English at the University of Warsaw . In 1995 he was a fellow at Oxford University and in 2002 at the European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris . In addition to his studies, he worked as a tutor and simultaneous interpreter from 1996 to 2002 . He was also a lecturer at the State School for Public Administration and the Collegium Civitas in Warsaw and an analyst at the College of Europe in Natolin . In 2004 he received his doctorate .

After Trzaskowski had initially worked as an advisor to Jacek Saryusz-Wolski in the European Parliament , he was a member of parliament himself from 2009 to 2013. Between December 3, 2013 and September 22, 2014, he was Minister of the Ministry of Administration and Digitization, established in 2011, in the second cabinet of Donald Tusk . He then was State Secretary for European Affairs under Ewa Kopacz until 2015 . In 2018 he was elected one of the Vice-Presidents of the European People's Party.

In 2017 Trzaskowski was presented for the election of mayor of Warsaw as a joint candidate of the PO and the Nowoczesna party . In the election in October 2018, he won 56.67 percent of the vote against his rivals in the first ballot, thereby inheriting his party colleague Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz .

Trzaskowski (m.) With Donald Tusk (l.) And Grzegorz Schetyna (2018)

In February 2019, as the city president of Warsaw, he campaigned for LGBTQ rights and wanted LGBTQ issues to be integrated into the sex education curricula of Warsaw's city schools. This is considered to be the trigger for the subsequent declarations of “ LGBTQ-free zones ” in various south-eastern regions of Poland.

On August 27, 2019, the underground pipeline connecting the Warsaw sewer system with one of the sewage treatment plants broke down. The Law and Justice Party (PiS) used this to publicly attack Trzaskowski, who, however, had nothing to do with the incident, even with regard to his responsibilities. The pipeline was repaired on November 14, 2019, but the attacks on Trzaskowski continued.

After the presidential election in Poland, originally planned for May 10, 2020, had to be postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland , the actual candidate of the PO, Deputy Speaker of Parliament Małgorzata Kidawa-Błońska , withdrew on May 15, 2020 due to falling Poll results from the election campaign. Trzaskowski was then elected as a substitute candidate by his party and thus prevailed within the party against Poland's long-time Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski . Instead of the 100,000 voter signatures that would normally be required for registration as a presidential candidate, the electoral commission was presented with a total of 1,622,868 verified voter signatures on June 9, 2020, about sixteen times more than required. In the first ballot on June 28, 2020, Trzaskowski received 30.46 percent of the vote and thus achieved second place behind the incumbent President Andrzej Duda with 43.5 percent of the vote. The runoff election between the two candidates took place on July 12, 2020. In the runoff elections Trzaskowski received 10 018 263 votes (48.97%), while Duda won the elections with 10 440 648 votes (51.03%).

Private

Trzaskowski is the son of the musician Andrzej Trzaskowski . He played in the children's television series Nasze podwórko, shot in 1980, as Tomek. He is married to Małgorzata and they have two children.