Jarosław Aleksander Kaczyński is a Polish politician and lawyer born on 18 June 1949 in Warsaw.

He is the identical twin brother of the late President Lech Kaczyński.

Their father, Rajmund Kaczyński, was an engineer and a soldier in the Home Army who took part in the Warsaw Uprising.

Their mother, Jadwiga Kaczyńska (née Jasiewicz), was a Polish philologist who worked at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences and had been a member of the Grey Ranks during the war.

As children they appeared together in the 1962 film The Two Who Stole the Moon.

Jarosław studied law at the University of Warsaw and obtained a doctorate in 1976.

He is the long-time leader of the Law and Justice party and is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in Polish politics of the early twenty-first century.

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    Siblings

    Jarosław has only one sibling, his identical twin brother Lech Aleksander Kaczyński, who was born about forty-five minutes after him on the same day.

    The brothers were extremely close throughout their lives and pursued parallel political careers.

    Lech served as Mayor of Warsaw, Minister of Justice, and President of Poland from 2005 until his death in the Smolensk air disaster on 10 April 2010.

    After Lech’s death, Jarosław became the central figure of the family’s political legacy.

    Their closest remaining relative is their niece Marta Kaczyńska, Lech’s daughter.

    On their mother’s side they also have a first cousin, Jan Maria Tomaszewski, with whom Jarosław has maintained a particularly close relationship in later years.

    Jarosław Kaczyński’s brother Lech

    Career

    Kaczyński became involved in anti-communist opposition activities in the 1970s and later worked with the Solidarity movement.

    After the Round Table Talks he was elected to the Senate in 1989 and served as chief of the Presidential Chancellery under Lech Wałęsa in 1990–1991.

    In 1990 he co-founded the Centre Agreement party and later, with his brother, established Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) in 2001.

    He has led the party since 2003.

    Following the 2005 elections, in which his brother became president, Jarosław served as Prime Minister from July 2006 to November 2007.

    After PiS returned to power in 2015 he remained the decisive political force behind successive governments headed by Beata Szydło and Mateusz Morawiecki, holding the formal post of Deputy Prime Minister in 2020–2022 and again briefly in 2023.

    He has been a continuous member of the Sejm for most of the period since 1991 and ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2010.

    Under his leadership PiS pursued a programme of conservative social policy, judicial reform, and stronger national sovereignty within the European Union.

    Accolades

    Kaczyński has received several Polish media and public distinctions rather than traditional state orders.

    He has been named Man of the Year by the weekly Gazeta Polska on three occasions (2004, 2015 and 2019) and by the weekly Wprost twice (2005 and 2015).

    He has also been awarded the title Man of Freedom by the magazine Sieci in 2016 and 2021, and received the Man of the Year award of the Economic Forum in 2015.

    Internationally he was decorated with the Order of St George’s Victory by Georgia in 2013 and with the Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise (second class) by Ukraine in 2022.