Andrzej Sebastian Duda (
Polish pronunciation (help·info)) (born 16 May 1972) is the President-elect of Poland.[1] He is a lawyer and a Member of the European Parliament.[2] He was the official candidate of the Law and Justice party for the office of President of Poland in the 2015 Polish presidential elections.[3] He won the presidential run-off held on May 24th 2015 against incumbent Bronisław Komorowski.
He comes from Kraków, the son of Janina Milewska and Jan Tadeusz Duda, professors at AGH University. His wife, Agata Kornhauser, is a German teacher at Jan III Sobieski High School, Kraków.[4] His father-in-law is Julian Kornhauser, a well-known Polish-Jewish writer, translator and literary critic.[5]
He studied law at the Jagiellonian University. In October 2001 he has been appointed as an assistant professor in Administrative Law Department of Jagiellonian University. In January 2005 he obtained the PhD in law at the same university.
He began his political career with the now-defunct Freedom Union Party in the early 2000s, but after the parliamentary elections in 2005, began his collaboration with the Law and Justice Party.[6] In 2010, he was an unsuccessful candidate to become the local President of Kraków as a PiS candidate,[7], but was more successful in the 2011 parliamentary election, where he received 79,981 votes for the Kraków area, and thus became an envoy to the Sejm.[8] However, he did not sit out the term, becoming elected in 2014 as a member of the European Parliament.[9]
In the first round of the presidential election, he came first, receiving 5,179,092 votes and thus 34.76% of valid votes.[10] In the second round he took 51.55% of the vote against the 48.45% share of his rival, incumbent president Bronisław Komorowski.[11]
He has appeared in a 2011 documentary film Mgła about the 2010 Smoleńsk crash.
In 2008, he received the Portuguese Order of Merit.[12]