Tusk: unflappable leader who has steered Poland through crisis after crisis

(WARSAW) - Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk is a pro-European free marketeer who has earned the reputation of being an unflappable leader able to turn even the most difficult situations to his advantage.

With political roots in Poland's anti-communist Solidarity trade union, the football-mad historian named on Saturday as the EU's next president started out as an underground journalist.

Under Communism, he also put his liberal ideals to work running a modest industrial painting business. Private enterprise was rare then, but small ventures were tolerated by the ruling Communist Party.

After a bloodless end to communist rule was negotiated in Poland in 1989, Tusk and a group of friends in his Baltic Sea hometown of Gdansk founded the Liberal Democratic Congress, pushing for sweeping privatisation of the state-run economy.

It won 37 of the 460 seats in parliament in the 1991 general election, only to lose them two years later. It then merged with the larger centrist Freedom Union.

Tusk led a breakaway faction in 2001 and formed the Civic Platform (PO).

While his 2005 presidential bid failed, the PO took power after a 2007 snap election and Tusk was propelled to a second consecutive term as prime minister in the 2011 general election.

He has the distinction of steering Poland though the global financial crisis as the only EU state to maintain growth.

He also steadied the country when in April 2010 an air crash in Smolensk, Russia, wiped out a large chunk of the Polish establishment, killing Poland's then president Lech Kaczynski, the country's top military brass, central bank chief and scores of MPs and other senior state figures.

- A savvy Kashubian -

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Tusk: unflappable leader who has steered Poland through crisis after crisis