Donald Franciszek Tusk born 22 April 1957is a Polish politician, who was the president of the European Council from 2014 to 2019. He served as the prime minister of Poland from 2007 to 2014 and was a co-founder and chairman of the Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska) political party. On 20 November 2019, Tusk was elected as the president of the European People's Party (EPP), Europe's largest transnational political party.
Tusk has been involved in Polish politics since the early 1990s, having founded several political parties and held elected office almost continuously since 1991. Tusk was one of the co-founders of the free-market-oriented Liberal Democratic Congress party. He entered the Sejm (lower chamber of Poland's parliament) in 1991, but lost his seat in the 1993 election which went badly for the Congress.
In 1994, the Congress merged with the Democratic Union to form the Freedom Union. In 1997, Tusk was elected to the Senate, and became its deputy speaker. In 2001, he co-founded another centre-right liberal conservative party, Civic Platform (PO), and he was again elected to the Sejm, and became its deputy speaker.
He was elected prime minister in 2007 and with his party's victory in the 2011 Polish parliamentary election, he became the first prime minister to be re-elected since the fall of Communism in Poland. In 2014, he became president of the European Council and was re-elected to this position in 2017. He resigned as Polish prime minister to take the role, having been the longest-serving prime minister of the Third Polish Republic.
