Aleksander Kwaà Âniewski (born 15 November 1954) is a Polish politician and journalist who served as the 3rd president of Poland from 1995 to 2005.
Kwaà Âniewski served as a minister in the communist government during the 1980s, and later led the post-communist centre-left Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland, a successor to the former ruling Polish United Workers' Party, and a co-founder of the Democratic Left Alliance. In 1995, he was elected to the presidency, defeating the incumbent, Lech Waà ÂÃÂsa, and was re-elected in 2000 in a decisive first-round victory. His presidency was marked by modernization of Poland, rapid economic growth (Poland's GDP doubled in ten years), the drafting of a new constitution (1997), and the accession of Poland to NATO (1999) and the European Union (2004). In 2004, he brokered a pro-democratic agreement during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.
According to a 2020 poll conducted by Rzeczpospolita, Kwaà Âniewski was considered the best president in the post-1989 history of Poland by a plurality of Poles.
Kwaà Âniewski was born in Biaà Âogard. From 1973 to 1977, Kwaà Âniewski studied Transport Economics and Foreign Trade at the University of Gdaà Âsk, although he never graduated. He became politically active at this time, and joined the ruling Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) in 1977, remaining a member until it was dissolved in 1990.
An activist in the communist student movement until 1982, he held the position of chairmanship of the University Council of the Socialist Union of Polish Students (SZSP) from 1976 to 1977 and the vice-chairmanship of the Gdaà Âsk Voivodship Union from 1977 to 1979. Kwaà Âniewski was a member of the SZSP supreme authorities from 1977 to 1982.
From November 1981 to February 1984 he was the editor-in-chief of the communist-controlled student weekly ITD, then editor-in-chief of the daily communist youth Sztandar Mà Âodych from 1984 to 1985. He was a co-founder of the first computer-science periodical in Poland, Bajtek, in 1985. From 1985 to 1987, Kwaà Âniewski was Minister for Youth Affairs in the Zbigniew Messner government, and then Chairman of the Committee for Youth and Physical Culture till 1990.
He joined the government of Mieczysà Âaw Rakowski, first as a Cabinet Minister and then as chairman of the government Social-Political Committee from October 1988 to September 1989. A participant in the Round-Table negotiations, he co-chaired the task group for trade-union pluralism with Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Romuald Sosnowski.
As the PZPR was wound up, he became a founding member of the post-communist Social Democratic Party of the Republic of Poland (SdRP) from January to February 1990, and its first chairman until he assumed the presidency in December 1995. He was also one of the founding members of the coalition Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) in 1991.
Kwaà Âniewski was an activist in the Student Sports Union from 1975 to 1979 and the Polish Olympic Committee (PKOL); he later served as PKOL president from 1988 to 1991. Running for the Sejm from the Warsaw constituency in 1991, he won the largest number of votes (148,533), although did not win an absolute majority. Kwaà Âniewski headed the parliamentary caucus of the Democratic Left Alliance in his first and second terms (1991âÂÂ1995).
He was a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and chairman of the Constitutional Committee of the National Assembly from November 1993 to November 1995.
In an often bitter campaign, Kwaà Âniewski won the presidential election in 1995, collecting 51.7 percent of votes in the run-off, against 48.3 percent for the incumbent, Lech Waà ÂÃÂsa, the former Solidarity leader. Kwaà Âniewski's campaign slogans were "Let's choose the future" (Wybierzmy przyszà Âoà ÂÃÂ) and "Poland for all" (Wspólna Polska).
Political opponents disputed his victory and produced evidence to show that he had lied about his education in registration documents and public presentations. There was also some mystery over his graduation from university. A law court confirmed that Kwaà Âniewski had lied about his recordâÂÂand this did not come to light until after the electionâÂÂbut did not penalise him for it. Kwaà Âniewski took the presidential oath of office on 23 December 1995. Later the same day, he was sworn in as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces at the Warszawa First Fighter Wing, in Mià Âsk Mazowiecki.
His political course resembled that of Waà ÂÃÂsa's in several key respects, such as the pursuit of closer ties to the European Union and NATO. Kwaà Âniewski also continued the transition to a market economy and the privatization of state-owned enterprises, although with less energy than his predecessor.
Hoping to be seen as "the president of all Poles", including his political opponents, he resigned from the SLD after the election. Every Polish president since then has renounced formal ties with their party upon taking office. Later, he formed a coalition with the rightist government of Jerzy Buzek with few major conflicts and on several occasions, he stood against movements of the SLD government of Leszek Miller. At one moment, support for Kwaà Âniewski reached as high as 80% in popularity polls; most of the time it was over 50%.
In 1997, the Polish newspaper Zycie reported that Kwaà Âniewski had met former KGB officer Vladimir Alganov at the Baltic sea resort Cetniewo in 1994. First Kwaà Âniewski denied ever meeting Alganov and filed a libel suit against the newspaper. Eventually, Kwaà Âniewski admitted that he had met Alganov on official occasions, but denied meeting him in Cetniewo.
Kwaà Âniewski's greatest achievement was his ability to enact a new Constitution of Poland to replace the modified Communist-era document then still in use. Although the old constitution had been pruned of its Communist and Stalinist character, the failure to create a new constitution had been a criticism often levelled at Waà ÂÃÂsa. Kwaà Âniewski actively campaigned for its approval in the subsequent referendum, and he signed it into law on 16 July 1997. He took an active part in the efforts to secure Polish membership of NATO.
He headed Poland's delegation at the 1997 Madrid summit, where Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary were promised membership; and the Washington summit, where on 26 February 1999, during the Kosovo conflict, which he supported, he signed the instruments ratifying Poland's membership of NATO. He also took an active part in promoting further enlargement of the alliance, speaking out in favor of membership for a further seven states and the open-door policy that leaves open the option of further members.
He was an author of the 2002 Riga Initiative, a forum for cooperation between Central European states, aimed towards further enlargement of NATO and the European Union.
An advocate of regional cooperation in Central and Eastern Europe, Kwaà Âniewski hosted a summit of the region's leaders at à Âaà Âcut in 1996. Speaking out against the danger organized crime posed to the region, he submitted a draft of a convention on fighting organised crime to the UN in 1996. He was an active participant at meetings of regional leaders in Portoroà ¾ in 1997, LevoÃÂa in 1998, and Lviv and Yalta in 1999.
After a history of sometimes acrimonious relations with Lithuania, Kwaà Âniewski was a driving force behind the presidential summit in Vilnius in 1997, at which the two countries' presidents signed a treaty of friendship. Poland subsequently became one of the strongest advocates of Lithuanian membership in NATO and the European Union and the strongest advocate of Ukraine in Europe. In 2000 he was re-elected in a single round, collecting 53.9 percent of the vote. His election campaign slogan was: "A home for allâÂÂPoland" (Dom wszystkichâÂÂPolska). To date, this is the only time since the end of Communism that a presidential election has been decided in a single round.
Following the 11 September 2001 attacks, Kwaà Âniewski organized an international conference in Warsaw, with the participation of leaders from Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe to strengthen regional activities in fighting international terrorism. Under Kwaà Âniewski's leadership, Poland became a strong ally of the United States in the war on terror and contributed troops in the Iraq War, a move that was highly controversial in Poland and Europe.
Poland was in charge of a sector of Iraq after the removal of Saddam Hussein. Polish membership of the European Union became a reality on 1 May 2004, during Kwaà Âniewski's second term. Both he and his wife Jolanta had campaigned for approval of the EU accession treaty in June 2003. He strongly supported including mention of Europe's Christian roots into the European Constitution. Thanks to his close relations with Leonid Kuchma, in late 2004 he became a mediator in a political conflict in Ukraine â the Orange Revolution, and according to some commentators, he played the major role in its peaceful solution.
After the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture in December 2014, Kwaà Âniewski admitted that he had agreed in 2003 to host a secret CIA black site in Poland, but that activities were to be carried out in accordance to Polish law. He said that a U.S. draft memorandum had stated that "people held in Poland are to be treated as prisoners of war and will be afforded all the rights they are entitled to", but due to time constraints, the U.S. had not signed the memorandum. The U.S. had conducted activities in great secrecy at the site.
In December 2005, when his presidency was coming to an end, he granted clemency for a post-Communist deputy minister of Justice Zbigniew Sobotka, who had been sentenced for 3.5 years of prison for revealing a state secret (effectively, he warned gangsters about an operation against them). Kwaà Âniewski changed the prison sentence to probation.
Another case of Kwaà Âniewski's controversial granting of pardons was the Peter Vogel case. The story goes back to 1971 when Piotr Filipczyà Âski, a.k.a. Peter Vogel was sentenced to 25 years in jail for a brutal murder (shortened to 15 years in 1979). Surprisingly enough, in 1983 (during martial law in Poland) he was granted a passport and allowed to leave the country. He returned in 1990 soon earning the nickname "the accountant of the Left" as a former Swiss banker who took care of more than thirty accounts of Polish social democrats. Despite an arrest warrant issued in 1987, Vogel moved freely in Poland and was eventually arrested in 1998 in Switzerland. After Vogel's extradition to Poland, in 1999 Kwaà Âniewski initiated the procedure of granting him amnesty. In December 2005 (a few days before leaving his office) Kwaà Âniewski pardoned Vogel despite the negative opinion of the procurer.
Kwaà Âniewski refused in 2003 to face a special parliamentary commission, which was set up to reveal all circumstances linked with Rywingate. Kwaà Âniewski argued, that the constitution did not allow parliamentary commissions to investigate the president, and there were no clear law opinions. The commission decided eventually not to summon Kwaà Âniewski.
For a second time Kwaà Âniewski refused as a witness to face the commission investigating the privatization of Orlen petrol concern, in March 2005. He argued that the actions of commission members, being in opposition to the leftist government supported by him, were directed against him. He sought to undermine the commission by releasing considerable amounts of information to journalists while only belatedly making it available to the commission members.
In 2007, the Institute of National Remembrance revealed that Kwaà Âniewski was registered during communist times as an agent "Alek" of the secret police, the Security Service (Sà Âuà ¼ba Bezpieczeà Âstwa â SB), from 1983 to 1989. Kwaà Âniewski himself denied having been an agent in a special statement, demanded from politicians by Polish law, and a court confirmed his statement.
On 7 March 2006, Kwaà Âniewski was appointed Distinguished Scholar in the Practice of Global Leadership at Georgetown University, where he teaches students in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service about contemporary European politics, the trans-Atlantic relationship, and democratization in Central and Eastern Europe. He also teaches a course on political leadership, convened by Professor Carol Lancaster, with former Spanish Prime Minister José MarÃÂa Aznar. He is also Chairman of the supervisory board of the International Centre for Policy Studies in Kyiv, Ukraine and a member of the International Honorary Council of the European Academy of Diplomacy. In 2008 Aleksander Kwaà Âniewski became Chairman of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation, a not-for-profit organization established to monitor tolerance in Europe, prepare practical recommendations to governments and international organisations on improving interreligious and interethnic relations on the continent. The organization is co-chaired by European Jewish Fund President Viatcheslav Moshe Kantor. Since June 2012 Kwaà Âniewski and Pat Cox lead a European Parliament monitoring mission in Ukraine to monitor the criminal cases against Yulia Tymoshenko, Yuriy Lutsenko and Valeriy Ivaschenko. Since 2011, Kwaà Âniewski has served on the Leadership Council for Concordia, a nonpartisan, nonprofit based in New York City focused on promoting effective public-private collaboration to create a more prosperous and sustainable future. Kwaà Âniewski was also involved with the EU talks with the Ukrainian government about the association agreement with the EU that the Ukrainian parliament failed to ratify in November 2013. After the Maidan unrest had installed the transitional government under Yatsenyuk, who signed the EU association agreement for Ukraine in 2014, Kwaà Âniewski took up in a director's post in the gas company â³Burisma Holdings Limitedâ³ which owns licenses for the major Ukrainian gas fields.
In 2019, he became a Member of the International Advisory Council (IAC) to Uzbekistan. In 2020, he assumed the position of Chair of the Eastern Europe and Central Asia Commission on Drugs.
In a plea agreement filed in United States Federal court on 14 September 2018, former Donald Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort admitted to organizing a group of former European heads of state to illegally lobby, starting in 2011, on behalf of then-Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. The plea agreement describes one of the heads of state involved in this secret lobbying as a "former Polish President" who "was also a representative of the European Parliament with oversight responsibility for Ukraine." At least one press report claimed that Kwaà Âniewski was this former Polish President.
Aleksander Kwaà Âniewski has been honored to date with the following decorations:
In 1979, Kwaà Âniewski married lawyer Jolanta Konty in a civil ceremony. They have one daughter, Aleksandra (born 1981).
He identifies as an atheist. In 2005, at the end of his second presidential term, the couple finalised their marriage in a low-key Catholic ceremony presided by Kwaà Âniewski's former presidential chaplain, in the presidential chapel. He is fluent in both English and Russian.
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