Donald Tusk

Donald Franciszek Tusk ( , ; born 22 April 1957) is a Polish politician who has served as leader of the Civic Platform party (PO) since 2021, having previously led the party from 2003 to 2014. He co-founded the party in 2001. He served as the Prime Minister of Poland from 2007 to 2014 and president of the European Council from 2014 to 2019. Tusk was also the president of the European People's Party (EPP) from 2019 to 2022.

Tusk has been involved in Polish politics since the late 1980s, having founded several political parties and held elected office almost continuously since 1991. He was one of the co-founders of the free-market-orientated Liberal Democratic Congress party. He entered the Sejm (lower chamber of Poland's parliament) in 1991, but lost his seat in the 1993 election which went badly for the Congress.

In 1994, the Congress merged with the Democratic Union to form the Freedom Union. In 1997, Tusk was elected to the Senate, and became its deputy speaker. In 2001, he co-founded another centre-right liberal conservative party, Civic Platform (PO), and he was again elected to the Sejm, and became its deputy speaker.

Tusk was a candidate for president of Poland in the 2005 election, and was appointed Prime Minister in 2007. With his party's victory in the 2011 Polish parliamentary election, he became the first prime minister to be re-elected since the fall of communism in Poland in 1989. In 2014, he became president of the European Council and was re-elected to this position in 2017. He resigned as Polish Prime Minister to take the role, having been the longest-serving prime minister of the Third Polish Republic and the third longest-serving Prime Minister of Poland after Józef Cyrankiewicz and Piotr Jaroszewicz.

He returned to Polish politics in 2021 as leader of Civic Platform. In the 2023 Polish parliamentary election, his Civic Coalition won 157 seats in the Sejm to become the second-largest bloc in the chamber. The other opposition parties won a majority of seats between them, putting them in position to end eight years of government by Law and Justice. Provided by Wikipedia