A divisive legacy: Andrzej Duda’s decade as Poland’s president

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

By Daniel Tilles and Stanley Bill

Andrzej Duda steps down next week following the end of his second – and constitutionally final – five-year term in office. On 6 August, Karol Nawrocki – a fellow conservative whom Duda endorsed – will be sworn in as his replacement.

During his decade in power, critics have derided Duda as “the pen” of Law and Justice (PiS) party leader Jarosław Kaczyński – supposedly signing anything sent to him during PiS’s eight years of rule from 2015 to 2023 and, since then, vetoing bills passed by the new, more liberal ruling coalition.

Yet, at the same time, he leaves office as Poland’s most-trusted politician, according to state pollster CBOS, which found in July that 53% of Poles trust the president while 35% distrust him. He is also one of only two presidents in Poland’s history to democratically win two terms.

What legacy does Duda leave behind? And, still aged just 53, what might be next for him following his departure from the presidential palace?

A domestic agenda defined by PiS

Duda’s time as president will be defined, above all, by his role in the controversial, often radical, policies pursued by PiS when it was in power – in particular, its overhaul of the judiciary.

It was Duda himself who paved the way for PiS to come to power in October 2015: his own dramatic presidential election victory five months earlier helped build the momentum that swept PiS into office.

Subsequently, the president regularly signed off on PiS’s judicial reforms and nominations. Here, history is unlikely to judge him kindly.

Many of those measures have been found by Polish and European courts to have violated the rule of law. Opinion polls show that most of the Polish public view PiS’s judicial reforms negatively, both in their effect and the motivation behind them.

They have resulted in chaos, with courts working more slowly than before and key institutions such as the Supreme Court and Constitutional Tribunal embroiled in often-paralysing disputes over their legitimacy.

Even former PiS prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki admitted, shortly before PiS was voted out of office, that the judicial reforms “haven’t turned out well”.

Duda’s own frustration was visible in a recent interview, where he lamented the failure to complete the reforms. He spoke angrily of a need to “cleanse” the judiciary of “post-communists and leftist liberals”, who make it “impossible to push anything through”.

Most drastically, he suggested there was “truth” in the suggestion that hanging traitors could discourage such obstructionism.

The president also played a willing role in the corruption and politicisation of public media during PiS’s time in power.

In 2020, he approved additional funding for state broadcaster TVP, which then went on to vocally support Duda’s re-election bid later that year, including suggesting that his opponent, Rafał Trzaskowski, was a pawn of Jewish interests.

More broadly, Duda will also be remembered for his vocal support of PiS’s socially conservative agenda, including its push for deeply unpopular tougher abortion rules, restrictions on contraception, and its vociferous anti-LGBT+ campaign.

During his 2020 re-election bid in particular, Duda enthusiastically joined PiS’s attacks on what they call “LGBT ideology”.

Polish presidents have generally been partisan, despite the supposed neutrality of the office. Yet Duda’s term has clearly not lived up to his own promise, made ten years ago, to be the “president of all Poles”, rather than just those who elected him.

Unsurprisingly, he has also been reluctant to compromise with the current government, which succeeded PiS in December 2023, though Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s ruling coalition has hardly been keen to meet him halfway.

Signs of being his own man

Yet despite his clear alignment with PiS, there were moments when Duda showed he was willing to stand up to his former party and seek to forge his own legacy.

No Polish president has vetoed more legislation from their own political camp than Duda. In 2017, he vetoed two of three controversial judicial reform bills passed by PiS in parliament, later pushing through his own replacements for them that watered down the government’s powers (admittedly transferring some of them to himself).

Twice in 2022 he vetoed bills that would have centralised government control over the school system. The year before that, he likewise vetoed a controversial bill that would have forced the US owner of Poland’s largest private broadcaster, TVN, to sell the station.

Such actions frustrated Kaczyński, who by all accounts was barely on speaking terms with Duda – a situation famously lampooned in the popular comedy series Ucho Prezesa (The Chairman’s Ear), where Duda was regularly depicted trying, and failing, to meet Kaczyński, whose secretary did not even know his name (referring to him as “Adrian”).

However, despite the mockery, Duda clearly succeeded to some extent in establishing an identity independent of PiS, as indicated by his approval ratings, which have been consistently higher than the party’s.

This is partly a consequence of the nature of the Polish presidency, which is largely ceremonial and does not involve the kind of day-to-day governance that can harm other politicians’ popularity.

But Duda also effectively presented himself as more moderate and conciliatory than PiS. Indeed, if one were to plot the position of the median Polish voter on the political spectrum, they would probably be closer to where Duda stands than to either Kaczyński or Tusk.

Duda even polls respectably well (over 30% approval) among voters of the centre-right parties of the Tusk coalition – the Polish People’s Party (PSL) and Poland 2050 (Polska 2050).

The current government – which has faced criticism for its failure to enact most of its promised agenda – may now regret failing to find compromise with Duda.

Tusk had clearly pinned his hopes on a more friendly president – his own “pen” – being elected this year. Instead, he will now face Nawrocki, a figure even harder to the right than the man he is succeeding. Duda may come to look relatively moderate in hindsight.

An important part of Duda’s legacy has also been the genuine efforts he made to travel the country and meet the people. During his first term, he achieved his ambition of visiting all 380 counties in Poland.

Duda has also pursued an active and vocal “historical policy”, seeking to promote heroic, positive elements of Polish history and attacking those he accuses of presenting a falsely negative view. This approach resonates with many Poles.

Yet, at times, he has also sought conciliation on these issues – in particular, by maintaining good relations with Israeli leaders despite regular tensions over the remembrance of Second World War history.

Cultivating relations with Washington and cheerleading for Kyiv

More broadly, foreign policy – a rare area in which Polish presidents generally do have influence – has been a relative success for Duda.

He has cultivated strong relations with the United States. Donald Trump, in particular, became a close political and ideological ally, with the pair exchanging regular friendly visits – including Duda being invited to the White House days before standing for re-election in 2020.

Yet he also established good relations with the Biden administration, after a rocky start when he was slow to congratulate Biden on his 2020 victory.

Here, Duda can justifiably claim some achievements, including a role in bolstering the US military presence in Poland and more broadly ensuring the continued strength of Poland’s most important security alliance.

Duda has also lobbied the US, and Trump in particular, to maintain its support for Ukraine. And the Polish president’s close relations with Kyiv mark another important element of his foreign-policy legacy.

Even before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Duda had established close ties with Volodymyr Zelensky. The two men appear to enjoy genuinely warm relations.

After the invasion, he became perhaps Ukraine’s most prominent international supporter. His name was the first inscribed on an avenue in Kyiv honouring those who have supported the country amid Russia’s aggression.

On the other hand, Duda no doubt played a role in the weakening of relations with Brussels during PiS’s time in office.

In 2018, he called the EU an “imaginary community which is of little relevance to Poles”, and since then he has regularly attacked the “EU elites” and accused Brussels of seeking to interfere in domestic politics and undermine Polish sovereignty.

What next?

After stepping down, Polish presidents tend to depart from frontline politics. Lech Wałęsa, Aleksander Kwaśniewski (who was younger than Duda when he finished his term) and Bronisław Komorowski have never again held public office.

However, there are signs that Duda retains political ambitions. In March this year, he made clear that, although “I am ending my presidency, I am not retiring”.

Asked in June if he would like to become prime minister, Duda refused to rule it out, saying he would “very seriously consider” all types of roles and that his decision would depend on “political needs and social perspectives”.

At certain stages, reports have also suggested that Duda hoped to obtain a position at a prominent international institution – perhaps with a helping hand from Trump. Such rumours have subsided somewhat, with no obvious opportunities on the horizon, and it appears more likely that Duda’s political ambitions are domestic.

It has long been suggested that he hopes to remain a leading figure on the Polish right, especially given questions over how long Kaczyński, now aged 76, can continue to be its dominant force.

Whenever Kaczyński does depart, he will leave a large vacuum, with Duda alleged to be one of a number of politicians in and around PiS hoping to fill it.

Given his continued strong approval ratings and his ten years as head of state, Duda might seem to be well placed among them. Yet he lacks a strong base of factional support within PiS after a decade formally outside of – and at times in conflict with – the party.

Duda’s political trajectory has, nevertheless, been tightly bound to PiS; the party also owes its longest period of sustained success between 2015 and 2023 in part to him. As the president leaves office, his future may remain closely connected to that of his former party.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Krzysztof Sitkowski/KPRP