jurist politician president university professor
Duda was born in Krakow, the son of Janina Milewska and January Tadeusz Duda, professors at Akademia Górniczo-Hutnicza im. Stanisława Staszica University. His father-in-law is Julian Kornhauser, a well-known writer, translator and literary critic.
He attended January III Sobieski High School, Krakow, where his wife, Agata Kornhauser-Duda, now teaches German. He studied law at the Jagiellonian University. In October 2001 he was appointed as an assistant professor in Administrative Law Department of Jagiellonian University, and in January 2005 obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in law there.
They met at a party while still attending rival schools and have been married since 21 December 1994. Together they have one daughter, Kinga, born in 1995, now also studying law. Due to his political career, he has been mostly on unpaid leave since September 2006, except for a 13-month interval beginning in September 2010, when he returned to the university.
He is a keen skier and while studying participated in the Polish Academic Championships in the Alpine skiing category.
From 2006 to 2007 he was an undersecretary of state in the Ministry of Justice. From 2008 to 2010 he was an undersecretary of state in the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland during the presidency of Lech Kaczyński.
In 2010, he was an unsuccessful candidate to become the Mayor of Krakow as a PiS candidate, but was more successful in the 2011 parliamentary election, where he received 79,981 votes for the Krakow area, and thus became an envoy to the Sejm. In September 2013, the paper Polityka commended him for being one of the most active MPs at the time, describing him as being open to opposition arguments and as refraining from personal attacks, as part of his role at the Commission for Constitutional Responsibility.
In the first round of the 2015 presidential election, he came first, receiving 5,179,092 votes and thus 34.76% of valid votes.
In the second round he took 51.55% of the vote against the 48.45% share of his rival, incumbent president Bronisław Komorowski. Presidency (2015–present) Duda rejected the European Union"s proposal of compulsory migrant quotas, saying: "I won’t agree to a dictate of the strong. 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".Duda is the first Polish president to consciously and willingly break the Polish constitution by not swearing in the rightfully elected judges of the Constitutional Tribunal. he is supporting the government which is violating constitutional laws and introducing authoritarian rule in Poland.he is facing massive opposition in Poland by the democratic liberal and western oriented majority of the society.
Duda began his political career with the now-defunct Freedom Union Party in the early 2000s, but after the parliamentary elections in 2005, began his collaboration with the Law and Justice Party (PIS). On 26 May 2015, he officially resigned from party membership.
Before the 2015 elections, he was a Member of the European Parliament. From 2007 to 2008 he was a member of the Polish State Tribunal. However, he did not sit out the term, becoming elected in 2014 as a member of the European Parliament.
