Bronislaw Komorowski: former radical turned consensus man
Once a political prisoner jailed for his radical anti-communist views, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, who is tipped to win a second term in elections starting Sunday, has evolved into a fatherly consensus-oriented figure. The 62-year-old former defence minister admits to having mellowed over the years -- except on national security, where he is seen as a hawk. "We want peace, but we know that weakness is the greatest encouragement for a potential aggressor and there is no better deterrent than a show of force and determination in self-defence," Komorowski, a historian, said days ahead of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II on May 8. The one-time wild game hunter has been a key player in the modernisation of Poland's defence forces since the country of 38 million shed communism along with the Warsaw Pact in 1989 and joined NATO a decade later. The father of five, who is a practising Catholic, has also risked the wrath of Poland's powerful Catholic Church by supporting legislation allowing test tube babies and a global human rights convention addressing violence against women. The church sees both measures as undermining traditional family values. - 'Radical' past - And yet the unflappable incumbent sees his "radical" days as belonging firmly in the past. "I opposed the Round Table," he has admitted, referring to the watershed 1989 deal between the communist regime and the banned Solidarity opposition movement, which steered Poland to democracy that year. "I considered the Round Table was a betrayal and that the communists were going to get us," he said. Unlike millions of fellow Poles, Komorowski boycotted the country's landmark June 1989 elections that helped oust the four-decade regime peacefully from power. But that changed several months later when he was tapped as a senior aide by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first non-communist prime minister in what was still the Soviet bloc. "He gave me the chance to change from a radical to a man of compromise and moderation," Komorowski said. Eight years earlier, Komorowski had been jailed with Mazowiecki and other anti-communist opposition figures when Poland's then leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, imposed martial law to try to crush Solidarity. In the 1990s, Komorowski was deputy defence minister in three governments, before taking the helm of the ministry in 2000 and 2001. He was a member of Mazowiecki's centrist Freedom Union and in 2001 joined its successor party, the liberal Civic Platform founded by current EU President and former Polish prime minister Donald Tusk. Komorowski and Tusk become close allies, although the former lacks the latter's charisma. A historian by training and a former teacher, Komorowski won seats in six successive parliamentary elections since 1991. In 2007, after Civic Platform trounced the then governing conservative Law and Justice party, he became speaker of parliament -- and then interim president after incumbent Lech Kaczynski perished in the April 10, 2010 crash of his presidential jet in Russia. He then went on to win early presidential elections later that year. He has since shaved off his trademark moustache but his thick-lensed glasses remain. - Blue blood - Komorowski has aristocratic roots and even a link to the Belgian royal family. His youth was not one of luxury, however. Apart from a few family portraits, the Komorowskis' property was all confiscated by the communists. He was born on June 4, 1952 in Oborniki Slaskie, southern Poland, to parents who had been expelled from what is now Lithuania by Soviet forces after World War II. The family later moved to a working-class district of Warsaw. Komorowski became an anti-regime activist, having a baptism of fire as a teenager in a March 1968 student revolt. "I learned all about police batons and their use," he recalled.
