Hanna Beata Gronkiewicz-Waltz (Polish pronunciation: [ˈxanna bɛˈata ɡrɔnˈkʲɛvid͡ʐ ˈvalt͡s] , born 4 November 1952) is a Polish politician and lawyer, Professor of Jurisprudence and politician who served as the city mayor of Warsaw between 2006 and 2018. She is the first and so far only woman to have held this position.
Contents
Life and career
Between 1992 and 2000, she was the chairman of the National Bank of Poland, the central bank of Poland. She resigned to take the position of the deputy chairman of European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a position she held between 2001 and 2004. Gronkiewicz-Waltz was elected to the Sejm on 25 September 2005 after receiving 137,280 votes in the 19th Warsaw district, running on the Civic Platform list. In the 2006 municipal elections, Gronkiewicz-Waltz served as Civic Platform's nominee for mayor of Warsaw. On 12 November she gained 34.23%, finishing next to Law and Justice candidate, former prime minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz. As neither received 50 percent of the vote, a second round election was held on 26 November, where Gronkiewicz-Waltz received 53.18% of the votes, winning the election.
In January 2007, just a few weeks into her term, Gronkiewicz-Waltz was at the center of a controversy that could have cost her the office. A law enacted in 2005 obliged the mayors of Polish municipalities to publicly disclose their own as well as their spouse's financial circumstances. The law requires the successful candidate's disclosure statement to be provided within 30 days after the inauguration, whereas the statement regarding the candidate's spouse is to be submitted within 30 days after the actual election. Gronkiewicz-Waltz submitted her own and her husband's statements on 2 January 2007, exactly 30 days after her inauguration. On 20 January, the newspaper Dziennik reported that Mr Waltz's documents had been two days past the deadline, which in his case had been on 28 December 2006. Based on this, Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński of the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party maintained that Gronkiewicz-Waltz's mandate had expired on 28 December 2006, and announced that the local elections would be repeated. Gronkiewicz-Waltz's party Civic Platform argued that the prime minister did not have the authority to make this decision, and that the case would need to be examined in court instead. Polish legal experts maintained that by submitting their statements on the same day, Gronkiewicz-Waltz had observed the spirit, if not the letter of the law. Also, having two different deadlines for the statements could be considered as an unconstitutional legal trap. In the meantime, Civic Platform announced that it would nominate Gronkiewicz-Waltz again, should the elections need to be repeated. On 13 March 2007, Poland's Constitutional Tribunal ruled against the governing Law and Justice party and struck down the controversial law that threatened her and many other public officials with the loss of their positions solely because they did not file paperwork on time.