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Donald Franciszek Tusk ( , ; born 22 April 1957) is a Polish politician who was president of the European Council from 2014 to 2019. He served as the 14th Prime Minister of Poland from 2007 to 2014 and was a co-founder and leader of the Civic Platform (''Platforma Obywatelska'') political party from 2003 to 2014. On 20 November 2019, Tusk was elected as the president of the European People's Party (EPP), Europe's largest transnational political party and on 3 July 2021 he returned to Polish politics by reassuming the leadership of the Civic Platform.

Tusk has been involved in Polish politics since the early 1990s, having founded several political parties and held elected office almost continuously since 1991. Tusk 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.

He was candidate for president of Poland in the 2005 election then he 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 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. Together with his long-time rival Jarosław Kaczyński, the highest ranked politicians on both the Polish center and right respectively, both have negative approval ratings for over 15 years.

Early life

Tusk was born in Gdańsk in northern Poland. He has Polish, German (maternal grandmother) and Kashubian ancestry. His father, also named Donald Tusk (1930–1972), was a carpenter, and his mother, Ewa (née Dawidowska) Tusk (1934–2009), was a nurse. The family's language was Danzig German. His grandfather, Józef Tusk (1907–1987), was a railway official who was imprisoned at the Neuengamme concentration camp; later, as a former citizen of the Free City of Danzig, he was apparently conscripted by German authorities into the Wehrmacht. Later on, he was successful in joining the Polish Armed Forces in the West.

Tusk has described the city of his youth as "a typical frontier town" with "many borders ... between ethnicities". This, together with his Kashubian ethnic ancestry and multilingual family, meant that he grew up with an awareness that "nothing is simple in life or in history", which informed his adult political view that it is "best to be immune to every kind of orthodoxy, of ideology and most importantly, nationalism". He has described his young life under communism as "so hopeless" due to the boredom and monotony, with "no hope for anything to change". His young self was a "typical hooligan" who often got into fights – "we would roam the streets, you know, cruising for a bruising."

Tusk credits his interest in politics to watching clashes between striking workers and riot police when he was a teenager. He enrolled at the University of Gdańsk to study history, and graduated in 1980. While studying, he was active in the Student Committee of Solidarity, a group that opposed Poland's communist rule at the time.

Early political career

Tusk was one of the founders of the Liberal Democratic Congress (Kongres Liberalno-Demokratyczny KLD), which in the 1991 elections won 37 seats in the lower house of parliament. The KLD later merged with the Democratic Union (UD) to become the Freedom Union (UW). Tusk became deputy chairman of the new party, and was elected to the Senate in the next election in 1997. In 2001, he co-founded Civic Platform, and became deputy speaker in parliament after the party won seats in the year's election.

2005 Polish presidential election

In the shade of the upcoming expiration of President Aleksander Kwaśniewski's second term and his inability to stand for a third term, Tusk and Lech Kaczyński were the leading candidates for the presidential elections. Although both leading candidates came from the centre-right, and their two parties had planned to form a coalition government following the parliamentary elections on 25 September, there were important differences between Tusk and Kaczyński. Tusk wanted to enforce a separation of church and state, favoured rapid European integration and supported a free-market economy. Kaczyński was very socially conservative, a soft Eurosceptic, and supported state intervention. Such differences led to the failure of POPiS coalition talks in late October. Jacek Protasiewicz headed his electoral campaign staff. Tusk's campaign motto was "President Tusk – A man with principles; We will be proud of Poland". In the election, Tusk received 36.6% of votes in the first round and then faced Kaczyński, who got 33.1% of votes in the first round.

In the second round, Tusk was defeated by Kaczyński.

One controversy during the election was the fact that Tusk's grandfather, Józef Tusk, had been a Nazi collaborator during WWII, having served in the German Wehrmacht during the war. The controversy, according to the BBC
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