Edward Stanisław Czesak is a Polish politician and mechanical engineer who sat in the Sejm for three terms between 2005 and 2015 and served as a Member of the European Parliament from 2015 to 2019. A member of Law and Justice, he chaired the Brzesko town and commune council from 1998 to 2002 and later served on the Małopolska Voivodeship Board.
Background
Edward Stanisław Czesak was born on 22 February 1951 in Tarnów, a city in the Lesser Poland Voivodeship in southern Poland. Tarnów later became the constituency he represented in the Sejm, where he was elected as a candidate from the Tarnów district.
His public career developed in the Lesser Poland region. He became closely associated with Brzesko, a town in the same region, where he served on the local council before moving to national office. His professional training in mechanical engineering and his later work in local and national politics formed the two main strands of his life.
Education
Czesak studied at the Akademia Górniczo-Hutnicza in Kraków, known in English as AGH University of Science and Technology, in the Faculty of Mining and Metallurgical Machinery. He qualified as a master engineer in 1976. The institution opened in 1919 as a mining academy, reflecting the industrial importance of coal and ore extraction in the region, and it adopted the name Akademia Górniczo-Hutnicza in 1949 to reflect its mining and metallurgical teaching.
In 1979 he completed postgraduate studies in trade in means of production at the Akademia Ekonomiczna in Kraków, the economics academy of the city that is now known as the Krakow University of Economics.
In 2003 he completed a postgraduate programme in legal and local-government studies, focusing on the constitutional foundations of local self-government. This training connected his technical education with his later work in local government and in the legislature.
Career
Czesak ran his own business before and alongside his political career. In the late 1990s he entered local government, serving as a councillor and as chairman of the Brzesko town and commune council from 1998 to 2002. He was elected to the council from the Solidarity Electoral Action list, the coalition from which Law and Justice later split.
In 2005 he was elected to the Sejm of the Republic of Poland, the lower house of the Polish parliament, for the Law and Justice list in the Tarnów constituency, receiving 7,529 votes. He was re-elected in 2007 with 17,944 votes and in 2011 with 18,787 votes. During these terms he sat on parliamentary committees that included infrastructure, state treasury, EU affairs, innovation and modern technologies, and environmental protection and natural resources.
He stood unsuccessfully in the 2014 European Parliament elections, but took a seat in June 2015 after Andrzej Duda became President of Poland and vacated his place. As a Member of the European Parliament from 11 June 2015 to 1 July 2019, he served on the Committee on Regional Development and on the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, and he was a substitute member of the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection. He did not seek re-election in 2019.
From October 2019 to November 2020 he was a member of the Małopolska Voivodeship Board, the executive body of the regional self-government in the Lesser Poland region. He took the place on the board left by Anna Pieczarka, who had been elected to the Sejm.
Politics
Edward Czesak was a member of Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS). He was elected to the Sejm on the party's list in the Tarnów constituency in 2005, 2007 and 2011, and he was head of the party's regional structures in the Tarnów area during his years as a deputy.
Law and Justice was founded on 13 June 2001 by the identical twins Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński as a successor to the Centre Agreement, after a split from the Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS) coalition. Commentators generally describe the party as national-conservative and nationalist, with a strong emphasis on state sovereignty, national identity, and reform of institutions inherited from the communist era. It won the 2005 parliamentary elections, governed in coalition with the League of Polish Families and Self-Defence from 2005 to 2007, and then remained in opposition until 2015.
Czesak's parliamentary career therefore spanned both the party's governing period and its years in opposition. In the European Parliament he sat with the European Conservatives and Reformists Group, the group to which Law and Justice belongs. In January 2025 he publicly announced that he had resigned from membership of the party, a decision linked by local reports to the selection of Law and Justice leadership in the Tarnów district.
Connections
Sejm records identify Czesak as married.
