Do we like Andrzej Duda?
Our score: 3 out of 10. A real record of standing by Ukraine, but a 2020 campaign against LGBTQ+ rights in his own words, and a mixed record on fair dealing, keep him low.
Duda was Poland's president for a decade, from 2015 to 2025, and the story of those years is mostly a fight over who controls the courts. When his term ended, Polish Radio ran a long list of criticisms of his judicial legacy, starting with his refusal to swear in five Constitutional Tribunal judges elected by the previous parliament. He waved off European criticism, saying “They won't tell us in foreign languages what system we should have in Poland.”
The pardon stoush says plenty about him. In January 2024 he pardoned former ministers Mariusz Kamiński and Maciej Wąsik, who had begun two-year prison sentences after being convicted of abusing their powers. The government says courts convicted them over forged documents and illegal surveillance, and Justice Minister Adam Bodnar advised against a pardon. Duda went ahead anyway, after insisting for weeks that his earlier 2015 pardons still stood.
The harm check is where he comes unstuck. At a June 2020 rally in Brzeg he likened LGBT 'ideology' to communist doctrine, days after floating a 'Family Card' that would bar gay couples from marrying or adopting and ban teaching about LGBT issues in schools. Love Does Not Exclude, a Polish rights group, said it resembled Russia's 'homosexual propaganda' ban. Duda replied that his words were taken out of context in a 'dirty political fight' and that he believes in tolerance, but he did not say how they had been misread.
On abortion he zigzagged. In October 2020, a week after welcoming the Constitutional Tribunal ruling that effectively banned nearly all abortions, he told RMF FM it should be allowed for fetal defects: “It cannot be that the law requires this kind of heroism from a woman.” The U-turn came after seven days of street protests. Separately, the Centre for Monitoring Racist and Xenophobic Behavior sued him over comments about people who watched the film Green Border. He says he never called viewers swine and only repeated what border guards said; a hearing was set for October 2025, and we found no ruling.
Lately he has taken a business job. He joined the supervisory board of ZEN.COM in October 2025, and prosecutors are now checking reports, first aired by TVN24, that the Lithuanian-registered firm may have acted as a payment operator for illegal online casinos in Poland. That is a probe into the company, and nothing we read says he is personally under investigation. He has publicly defended ZEN over a 1.8 million euro Lithuanian fine for money-laundering failures. In April 2026 he was also in Kyiv for the Kyiv Security Forum.
The good stuff is real, and it is Ukraine. In June 2025 Zelenskyy gave him the Order of Freedom, Ukraine's highest honour for a foreigner, citing his work on Ukrainian-Polish cooperation and support for Ukraine's sovereignty. In an April 2025 interview he argued Europe made too many concessions to Russia before 2022 and said “there is no one outside the United States who can stop Putin.”