Andrzej Sebastian Duda, was born on May 16, 1972 in Cracow. He is a Polish politician who serves as the sixth and current President of Republic of Poland, holding the office since 6 August 2015.

In 1997, President Duda defended his Master’s Thesis and started working as an academic teacher and scholar at the Chair of Administrative Proceedings, and as of 2001, the Chair of Administrative Law of the Jagiellonian University. In 2005, following the presentation of his dissertation “the Legal Interest in the Polish Administrative Law”, President Duda obtained a doctoral degree in law.

Before his tenure as President, from 2008 to 2010, during the presidency of the late Lech Kaczyński, Duda was an undersecretary of state in the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland. In the 2011 parliamentary election, he received 79,981 votes for the Kraków constituency, as a candidate for the Law and Justice party, and became member of the Sejm (Parliament). In September 2013, the news weekly magazine Polityka commended President Duda 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. President Duda remained a member of the Sejm until he was elected to the European Parliament in 2014.

Andrzej Duda was the presidential candidate for Law and Justice party, during the presidential election in May 2015. In the first round of voting, he received 5,179,092 votes – 34.76% of valid votes. In the second round of voting, he received 51.55% of the vote, winning with the incumbent president Bronisław Komorowski, who received 48.45% of the vote. On 26 May 2015, Duda resigned his party membership assuming the position of president-elect.

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Defence and Deterrence for a New Era