Komorowski, Bronisław
Bronisław Komorowski, 1952–, Polish political leader, grad. Warsaw Univ. (1977). In his youth he joined the prodemocracy movement and was arrested several times; he was interned briefly in the early 1980s when Poland was under martial law. During the rest of the 1980s he taught history and edited an underground newspaper. With the fall (1989) of Poland's Communist regime, Komorowski entered politics was elected (1991) to parliament's lower house (Sejm). He held various government posts, including defense minister (2000–2001), and in 2001 joined the centrist Civic Platform party. In 2007 he became marshal (speaker) of the Sejm, and when Pesident Lech Kaczyński died in a plane crash (April, 2010) he became acting president. In July, 2010, Komorowski won the presidency after a runoff with the late president's twin brother, the former prime minister Jarosław Kaczyński, but he lost his bid for reelection in 2015.