Seoul Gazette - Trzaskowski: pro-EU polyglot eyeing Polish presidency

Trzaskowski narrowly won the first round of voting on May 18, polling 31 percent against 30 percent for Karol Nawrocki, a historian backed by the conservative opposition.

"I promise you that I will be a president who unites, who is ready to talk to everyone," Trzaskowski promised a crowd of supporters as he rallied for support a week before the runoff.

A former deputy foreign minister, the 53-year-old is also the son of a jazz pioneer and great-grandson of the man who created Poland's first secondary schools for girls.

Trzaskowski is backed by the governing Civic Coalition party of Prime Minister Donald Tusk and will face off against Nawrocki, the Law and Justice candidate.

Trzaskowski narrowly lost his first presidential bid in 2020 to the conservative Andrzej Duda, who backs Nawrocki.

- Early start -

Trzaskowski comes from an intellectual Warsaw family.

His father Andrzej was a famous pianist during the 1950s, when jazz was considered the music of the "enemy" under the Iron Curtain.

Trzaskowski himself started out in politics in a seismic year for the former Soviet bloc -- 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down.

A teenager at the time, he quit school and worked as a volunteer campaigning during the first free elections in Poland, which marked the end of the communist era.

He graduated from the University of Warsaw, where he later earned a doctorate with a thesis on EU reform.

He has also studied in Oxford and Paris, and at the College of Europe outside Warsaw.

He speaks English, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish and worked for a time as an English teacher.

As a Francophile, he has even earned the nickname "Bonjour", or hello in French -- a jab from critics who view Trzaskowski as elitist.

In 2000, he worked on Poland's accession to the European Union, then became an adviser to the Civic Platform delegation in the European Parliament.

He became an EU lawmaker in 2009, and in 2013 joined an earlier government led by Tusk, who went on to become president of the European Council.

Trzaskowski first served as technology minister and then deputy foreign minister.

As a member of the Polish parliament between 2015 and 2018, he was elected vice president of the European People's Party in 2017.

Trzaskowski was elected mayor of Warsaw in 2018 and re-elected in 2024, but critics say he has failed to do enough while in office.

- 'Absurd' -

Trzaskowski, who is married with two children, has vowed to campaign for women's rights and legalise abortion in the predominantly Catholic country, which has a near-total ban on the procedure.

In March, on International Women's Day, he promised to ensure that "this medieval anti-abortion law becomes a thing of the past".

He has said he would back measures to allow abortion until the 12th week -- a move pledged by the Civic Coalition, which has yet to vote the changes through in parliament.

On LGBTQ rights, another hot-button issue in Poland, Trzaskowski has said he backed the idea of civil unions, including for same-sex couples.

The European Court of Human Rights has condemned Poland for refusing to recognise and protect same-sex couples, who cannot marry or register their partnerships.

In an election debate in April, Trzaskowski said it was "completely absurd that two people... who are together their whole lives, cannot visit each other in the hospital or inherit from one another".

When he was elected Warsaw mayor, he signed an "LGBT+ Declaration" promising to protect gay people, angering the country's right-wing nationalists, who campaign against a perceived "LGBT ideology".

But as he tried to woo voters from across the political spectrum ahead of the runoff, he was photographed chatting over pints with far-right leader Slawomir Mentzen.

In a Facebook post he once described his love of old books and stated that he had smoked marijuana in his youth but only "rarely".

He owns a French bulldog named Babel ("Bubble"), with whom he frequently poses for photos.

N.Hong--SG