Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz

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Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz born 1952

Function:	President of Warsaw
Party:	Platforma Obywatelska

Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz (born November 4, 1952 in Warsaw) is a Polish liberal-conservative politician and since December 2, 2006 the President of Warsaw. She is the first woman to ever hold this position.

Between 1992 and 2000 she was the Chairman of the National Bank of Poland, the central bank of Poland. Resigned to take a position of the Deputy Chairman of European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a position she held between 2001 and 2004. She was elected to Sejm on September 25, 2005 getting 137,280 votes in the 19th Warsaw district, running on the Platforma Obywatelska list.

In the municipal elections of 2006 Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz was Platforma's nominee for the position of mayor (president) of Warsaw. On November 12 she gained 34.23% and came in second, just after the candidate of Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, former Prime Minister of Poland Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz. As neither received 50 percent of the vote, a second round was held on 26 November, when Gronkiewicz-Waltz received 53.18% of the votes.

In January 2007, just a few weeks into her term, Gronkiewicz-Waltz is at the center of an affair that could ultimately cost her the job. A law enacted in 2005 obliges 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 January 2nd, 2007, exactly 30 days after her inauguration. On January 20th, the newspaper Dziennik reported that Mr. Waltz's documents had been two days past the deadline, which in his case had been on December 28th, 2006. Based on this, prime minister Jarosław Kaczyński of the governing Law and Justice party maintains that Gronkiewicz-Waltz's mandate had expired on December 28th, 2006, and announced to repeat the local elections. Gronkiewicz-Waltz's party Platforma Obywatelska argues that the prime minister does not have the authority to make this decision, and that the case would need to be examined in court instead. Polish legal experts maintain that by submitting their statements on the same day, Gronkiewicz-Waltz had observed the spirit, even 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, Platforma Obywatelska announced that it would nominate Gronkiewicz-Waltz again, should the elections need to be repeated. As of January 25th, the issue is still pending. On Tuesday, March 13, 2007, Poland's Constitutional Tribunal ruled against the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party and struck down the controversial law that threatened her and many other public officials, who were elected democratically, to lose their jobs solely because they did not file paper work on time.