Andrzej Duda

Andrzej Duda (born May 16, 1972, Kraków, Poland) is a politician who served as president of Poland from 2015 to 2025. He first gained the position in 2015, when he defeated the incumbent, Bronisław Komorowski. Duda represented the Law and Justice Party, a socially conservative group that is skeptical of the European Union (EU) and has strong ties to the Roman Catholic Church. After he took office, the country made significant changes to its judiciary and closed its borders to refugees from Syria and Afghanistan. Duda also sought to ban what he called the “propagation of LGBT ideology” in schools and public institutions.

Duda was born and grew up in Kraków. He finished high school there in 1991 and enrolled at the city’s Jagiellonian University, ultimately earning a doctorate in law. He served as a teacher and scholar at the university’s department of administrative law for several years and then went into private practice in 2005. He took his first political position in 2006, as a deputy in the Ministry of Justice. In 2010 he won a post on Kraków’s city council. In 2011 he was elected to the parliament of Poland. He won a seat in the European Parliament in 2014.

In 2015 Duda was reportedly chosen by Jarosław Kaczyński, Poland’s former prime minister, who founded the Law and Justice Party and is widely regarded as one of the most powerful figures in Polish politics, to run for the presidency. Poland’s prime minister is in charge of the government, and the presidency is a somewhat ceremonial role. However, the president is head of the armed forces and can propose and veto legislation.

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Kaczyński’s time as prime minister was marked by considerable controversy, and one poll suggested that he was trusted by less than a third of Poles. To contest the leadership of the Civic Platform (a center-right party with a free-market orientation), he recruited two younger party members who had demonstrated their loyalty and backed them in electoral campaigns. Duda ran for president, and Beata Szydło ran for prime minister. Both candidates won, with Duda receiving 51.55 percent of the vote. He was 43 when he became president.

Law and Justice has positioned itself as the party of Poles who have not benefited from Poland’s adoption of capitalism since the end of communist rule. The party is strongly in favor of the alliance with the U.S. but has often had tensions with Germany and the EU. In his campaign, Duda presented himself as a relatively moderate member of the party. His priorities included imposing new taxes on foreign-owned banks and supermarkets and returning banks to Polish control.

Shortly after he was sworn in, Duda rejected a German-backed plan for every country in the EU to accept a certain number of refugees as part of the continent’s migration crisis. He said each country should decide for itself on the appropriate number. “I won’t agree to a dictate of the strong,” he said at a conference in Poland. “I won’t back a Europe where the economic advantage of the size of a population will be a reason to force solutions on other countries regardless of their national interests.”

Poland, which was the biggest net beneficiary of the EU’s budget, had agreed to accept about 2,000 migrants under the previous regime, but the new government, led by Law and Justice, quickly backtracked on that promise. Also during Duda’s time as president, his party introduced a number of laws it billed as reforms to the judiciary, though opponents have said these changes opened the judiciary up to more political interference and influence. These included putting politicians in charge of appointing new judges (previously, the responsibility had belonged to fellow judges) and creating a new avenue for judges to be disciplined.

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In 2020 Duda ran for reelection. He launched a “family charter” amid his campaign, promising not to support gay marriage or adoption by gay couples and to “ban the propagation of LGBT ideology” in schools and public institutions. He won reelection in July of that year with 51.03 percent of the vote. In October Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled that pregnant people could not seek abortions in cases where fetal deformities were detected. At first Duda welcomed the ruling, but after seven days of massive protests he announced that he believed women should have the right to terminate such pregnancies.

Despite its stance on migration from the Middle East, Poland’s government was not isolationist during Duda’s time in office. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Poland sent a disproportionately large amount of equipment and aid to Ukraine, and, by the spring of 2023, it was hosting 1.3 million Ukrainian refugees. In 2022 Duda visited Ukraine three times in demonstration of Polish support, meeting with Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky.

The presidency of Poland is limited to two terms, which meant that Duda could not run again. In 2025 he was succeeded by Karol Nawrocki, who campaigned as an independent but was backed by the Law and Justice Party.