On April 7, 2022, Ludwik Dorn, a longtime Member of the Polish Parliament, former Speaker of the Sejm, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, passed away.
Ludwik Dorn was born on June 5, 1954 in Warsaw. He attended the renowned Tadeusz Reytan Secondary School. At that time, he joined the scout team “Black One”, known for its attitudes opposing communism and the monopoly of the Polish United Workers’ Party. There he later met opposition activists. In 1978 he graduated with a degree in sociology from the University of Warsaw .
In the mid-1970s, he became involved in helping repressed workers and joined the Workers’ Defense Committee and the Social Self-Defense Committee “KOR”. From 1977 he published in the underground press, incl. being an associate of the editorial office of the monthly “Głos”. In 1980 he became a member of Solidarity, and during martial law he was prosecuted by arrest warrant.
After the political changes of 1989, together with Jarosław Kaczyński and his environment, he founded the Centre Agreement party (Polish: Porozumienie Centrum; 1990) and was an employee of the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland, Lech Wałęsa (1990–1992). For several years he was one of the closest associates of the Kaczyński brothers, with whom, inter alia, in 2001 he founded Law and Justice (Polish: Prawo i Sprawiedliwość).
In the years 1997–2015 he was a member of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland, and in 2005–2007, he was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior and Administration. In 2007, he was a Marshal of the Sejm for several months.
He was also a translator (including spy novels by John le Carré, poems by John Keats and W.B. Yeats) and the author of popular fairy tales for children.
In recent years, the paths of Ludwik Dorn and the party he founded had diverged. He became closer to the parties opposed to Law and Justice, in 2015 unsuccessfully running for a seat on behalf of the Civic Platform (Polish: Platforma Obywatelska).
Representatives of various political factions in Poland unanimously admit that Dorn was an outstanding figure, of undisputed merit for the country.
